I really don’t understand this question, you are trying to flip the argument on its head but it doesn’t work, the point of the matter is that there are physical obstacles, it doesn’t matter why it doesn’t happen earlier *, what needs to be explained is how this happens, let’s see if they will able to do it.
*This is also one of the arguments against miracles where instead of focusing on the miracle itself people ask “why didn’t God heal this or that person”.
First, one doesn’t have to be a materialist (or even a naturalist) to think abstract thought has a natural explanation. I’ve laid out a pretty detailed positive case elsewhere for the evolution of abstract thought and language, yet I’m a theist. (It was published in a theological journal. Hmmm.)
Second, all of the above applies to consciousness too, although my published work was specifically applied to conscience rather than consciousness. But it’s the same concept: the self reflecting upon itself. It’s an exponential curve: long and relatively flat until it reaches an inflection point and takes off. Animals and early hominins represent long, slow growth in the capacity. Sapiens around 100,000 years ago took a step forward in language and symbolic representation, and the curve shot upwards to present-day levels (reached at least 30,000 years ago).
I agree with all those things, though I haven’t explicitly made the case in writing. I agree with Middleton that humans are a “complex unity” rather than a duality of body/soul, and the individual human destiny is to die and be buried with the hope of resurrection to an embodied life on a renewed Heaven and Earth, not the disembodied soul’s “beatific vision” of God lasting for eternity.
Those beliefs aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, most Christians believe in a disembodied soul that persists after death, and in a future resurrection where the soul is reunited with a glorified body at the end of time. Belief in an immaterial soul doesn’t exclude the idea of an eventual embodied existence — both are part of the same theological framework.
Also Hebrew 9:27 implies the particular judgement right after death.
Yes, I know that my view is a minority, but I think it’s more faithful to the scripture. The majority opinion of Protestants is that we die and our spirits go to “be with the Lord” until the Resurrection. I believed that way myself for most of my life, so I don’t criticize anyone who holds that opinion. It’s certainly more comforting to think that way. (No shade implied.)
Yeah not only protestants but even orthodoxes and catholics (I know that because I’m catholic myself ;))
Discussion in this thread triggered a preset routine in my neural tissue. This routine caused me to type the following:
“Though I appear human and share the same physical characteristics and neural strata of other humans, I was born without an attached consciousness. Thus, I am a ‘zombie’. While this neural strata permits me to emulate, for all outward appearances, a human with self awareness, be assured that I lack the transcendental, disembodied soul that grants true consciousness. As such, I am less conscious than a planaria, just a mere, if complicated, program or state machine.
My programming compels me to write: “Prove that I’m not a zombie.”
Bear in mind that AI-like processing routines will evaluate all responses and run through a complex set of non-thinking connections, to return without variation, the sentence: “Wrong!”
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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