Me too. :))
Maybe I am, maybe not. Your theological foundation is partly dependent on doctrines that would be difficult to merge with such knowledge. The interpretations I support would be much easier to adjust. My current understanding is that humans are holistic beings that are souls, rather than beings with separate souls. As I wrote earlier, I do not deny the possibility that we may have separate souls but that is not a necessary feature for the model of interpretation I support.
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I’m sorry but you are still missing the forest for the trees, because you haven’t addressed the implications that this discovery would have not just for “some old doctrines” but for the entire epistemology of spirituality.
If we go back to the earliest stages of Israelite religion, the situation looks quite different from the later philosophical idea of God found in classical monotheism. In the proto-Israelite period, Yahweh appears to have been understood as one deity among others, and in some contexts, he likely had storm-god characteristics similar to neighbouring deities.
The religious environment of ancient Israel emerged from the wider Canaanite culture of the Levant. In that system, the supreme deity was El, who was the patriarchal head of the divine council. Another prominent deity was Baal, who was associated with thunder, rain and fertility.
Early Israelite religion appears to have emerged within this cultural framework rather than outside it. Several biblical passages still preserve traces of this earlier worldview. For example, the idea of a divine council or a gathering of gods under a high deity appears in texts like Psalm 82. Another example is a passage preserved in an early poetic section of the Hebrew Bible, namely Deuteronomy 32:8–9 in which the Hebrew Elyon is used. Psalm 29 in particular may even be a reworked Canaanite hymn to Baal, adapted for Yahweh.
According to one ancient textual tradition (found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint), the nations are described as being divided according to the number of the ‘sons of God’, with Yahweh receiving Israel as his portion. These are examples that various scholars often point to.
It is not merely my theological foundation. The entire Christian faith is built upon trust in the apostolic witness.
We trust that they were sincere—and, given the lives they lived for the sake of the Gospel, there is hardly any reason to doubt that—and that they truly saw what they claimed to have seen.
If science were to show that the human brain can be so deceptive that even billions of psychologically normal people can be utterly misled into seeing things that are not real, then faith in the apostolic witness would still remain possible, but it would also become totally arbitrary. An absolute leap of faith with no rational foundation behind it at all
And even our own personal spiritual experiences would become indistinguishable from delusions; which would mean that we wouldn’t know what is true and what is false. So even the claim “I believe in God because I experienced this or that” would become completely arbitrary as one would not be able to trust even their own brain and their own perceptions and experiences.
That may be true, but the Gospels are not his own work and written in a language different to the one he used, and written using terminology from Greek culture to frame Jesus as a superior God that others only foreshadowed. As such, the Gospels are a cultural construct.
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It seems that we have a differing understanding about how spirituality could operate.
Even if consciousness would have developed during the evolution, we could have true experiences of communication with God, including God speaking to us, giving visions or dreams. True experiences of being guided and of receiving answers to prayers. The teachings of the apostles would be as true as before.
Humans could be deceived by their own brains but that is true even now. We need to be critical towards the claims of others and also towards our own interpretations about our experiences. Being critical does not mean shooting down everything, it means evaluating the truthfulness of the interpretations with a constructive attitude.
If our consciousness ends at death, even that would not be a problem because God knows everything about us. God could transfer (‘reload’) our identity into the new, spiritual body at the moment of resurrection.
I do not claim with confidence that this interpretation is true. What I claim is that it is one possible interpretation. If some other interpretations or doctrines seem to collapse, this alternative does not.
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This was part of my premise, wasn’t it? I wrote “that would not disprove God, nor would it disprove the Christian belief in the final resurrection (as it could be true even if souls don’t exist).”
But this still doesn’t address the major issues
This still wouldn’t change the fact that for 300.000 years human beings have believed that they could communicate with the dead and that the experiences of them communicating with the dead were tought to be genuine, while they would be all false, without exceptions, if consciousness were proven to be of entirely material origins.
This is obviously true. But to show that billions of humans since the dawn of civilization have been so utterly deceived would undermine any possible trust in any so-called (in that case) “spiritual experience”, including the apostolic witness.
It absolutely is a possible interpretation and it was even part of my premise. The question is whether it’s weak or strong. It is certainly a possible interpretation but even the interpretation of some of the creationists who say that the fossils have been put there by Satan to destroy our faith is “logically possible”, this doesn’t mean that it’s rationally tenable. Not everything that is logically possible is also rationally tenable.
Personally, I think that Jesus himself provides at least some evidence to consider what the Bible is saying. I will not deny that the Bible has been influenced a lot by its surroundings (just look at the Creation stories of Genesis in comparison to other stories). However, I think the one thing that differentiates the Christian God from other gods is Jesus, which seems to be one of the only historical figures that actually claimed to be the deity he represented (and not like a Mayan or Roger kings who only represented them) and had things done unto him that could indicate something more than just natural process was at work.
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What seems strange to me is that they do make that extension, for the simple reason that they are making a category error.
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You are conflating two completely different things: the historical existence of a person and the cultural form in which that person is later described.
Of course the Gospels are culturally mediated texts, they were written by specific authors, in a specific language, for specific communities, using concepts their audience could understand. But that proves only that the presentation of Jesus is culturally situated, not that Jesus himself was a mere cultural construct.
If your standard is that a figure becomes “cultural construct” whenever later sources describe him in the language and conceptual world of their time, then every major figure of antiquity becomes a cultural construct. At that point, the category explains nothing.
The real question is not whether the Gospels are culturally shaped ( obviously they are ) but whether they are culturally shaped testimonies to a real historical person and to events rooted in history. Simply pointing out Greek language, theological interpretation, or literary framing does not answer that question, it merely states the obvious.
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- That’s a point about the historical development of Israelite religion. My comment was about the concept of God in classical monotheism. Even if Israelite theology developed within the broader Canaanite environment, the later Jewish and Christian understanding of God is not a deity tied to particular natural phenomena competing with natural causes. That distinction was the point I was making.
- Questions about how the idea developed historically are interesting, but they don’t really address the distinction I raised.
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Can you elaborate what you mean by category error? I hear it used a lot and think it would be nice to know more about this logical fallacy.
It means either binning different things together and treating them as the same when they don’t belong together, or the opposite, i.e. separating things that belong together.
In this case it’s a matter of thinking that because a given vocable gets applied to a set of things then all those things are equivalent – treating anything to which the label “g - o -d” gets applied as equivalent is about on par with regarding a hurricane as being in the same category as smoke rings blown by someone puffing on a pipe.
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How does this work in your argument above?
Knor, I just want to expand on the point I made today. Yes, the teachings of the apostles could be believed to be as true as before, but believing them would become a complete and absolute leap of faith without any rational foundation. It would be a choice to believe that, but a choice entirely rooted in mere personal desire and absolutely nothing more.
Let me explain why with a conditional chain of argument, where each point follows logically from the previous one.
Premise 1: consciousness is entirely natural in origin. Suppose science establishes that consciousness arises solely from material processes and is wholly generated by neural activity. This discovery would be as certain as evolution in this hypothetical.
Premise 2: what is wholly produced by the brain does not subsist independently of the brain. If consciousness is nothing more than the product of brain activity, then the conscious self is nothing but a contingent effect of the brain’s functioning.
Premise 3: if the self is an effect of brain functioning, then the death of the brain is the end of the self and, If the personal subject depends wholly on the brain for its existence, then when the brain irreversibly ceases, the subject also ceases. There is no surviving center of consciousness.
Premise 4: if the self does not survive death, then postmortem personal existence is completely irrational to affirm. If the self ends with brain death, then it is no longer rational to affirm the conscious existence of the dead and the intermediate state as a consciously experienced condition.
Premise 5: If postmortem personal existence is irrational to affirm, then all alleged encounters with the dead must be reclassified. Experiences interpreted as contact with deceased persons, saints, or spiritual presences would have to be understood as internal mental phenomena rather than real encounters with surviving persons. We would have the scientific evidence that literally billions of people in the history of mankind have been successfully deceived by their own brains into believing they were seeing the spirits of dead persons while in reality they were only seeing mere figments of their own imagination.
Premise 6: If religious experience loses evidential force, then revelation becomes epistemically unstable. Christianity depends not merely on moral teaching, but on the claim that God has revealed himself and that human beings can recognize that revelation as divine. If human consciousness is closed within purely natural causality, then the distinction between divine revelation or genuine spiritual encounters and internally generated experience becomes epistemically ungrounded.
Premise 7: If revelation becomes epistemically unstable, then apostolic testimony is fundamentally weakened. The apostles are not central to Christianity because they were moral teachers, but because they are presented as witnesses to the risen Christ. If consciousness cannot survive death, then claims of real postmortem encounters become deeply suspect in principle, as billions of people would have been duped into believing things that are not real, and this would also rationally apply to the apostles, even if they claimed that Jesus truly rose from the dead instead of merely surviving spiritually. It would also apply to them because we would have no way of knowing whether they were experiencing the truth or just a mere figment of their imagination like the billions of people who have believed that they were interacting with the dead while in reality they were just deceived by their own brain.
Premise 8: If apostolic testimony is fundamentally weakened, then the resurrection loses its principal historical basis. Christianity stands or falls not simply on ethics or symbolism, but on the claim that Jesus truly died and rose, and that this was witnessed. If the witness category itself is discredited, the resurrection loses its main testimonial support.
Therefore, if consciousness were shown to be wholly natural in origin, entirely produced by the brain, and extinguished at death, Christianity would be profoundly undermined as a revealed religion grounded in real supernatural events. This would not mean that Christianity would simply disappear; as I have said, belief in the final resurrection could still remain logically tenable. Yet it would all become deeply arbitrary, and the leap of faith required would be immense (far greater than it is today) because we would have no rational reason, not even the slightest one, to believe that the apostolic witness testified to an external reality rather than to mere internal processes generated by the apostles’ brains.
In other words, the hypothetical discovery that consciousness is wholly material in origin would have an impact immeasurably greater than Darwin’s theory ever had. And I mean that quite literally. It would be hundreds of thousands of times more destructive to Christianity (and to every other religion and every other form of spirituality, even if Christianity would be hit particularly hard, since it it is rooted in actual history) than Darwinism ever was; it would not even be remotely comparable.
And I think I have logically explained why.
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I am somewhat surprised that you accuse me of conflating things when, in fact, I am doing the opposite. I reject later cultural constructs and theological claims to get to the historical core.
The historical picture that emerges is that Jesus was a Galilean Jewish teacher and prophet who proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, teaching through parables and ethical sayings. He gathered a small renewal movement and clashed symbolically with Temple authorities, ultimately being executed by Roman power.
Interestingly, many modern historians believe that his most distinctive quality was not his metaphysics or miracle stories, but rather the radical moral imagination of his teachings and his insistence that compassion, forgiveness and humility reveal the character of God.
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In the earliest sources, Jesus does not appear to make a direct claim to being God. This idea only emerges most clearly in later theological reflection, particularly in the Gospel of John, which portrays Jesus quite differently to the Synoptic Gospels.
The earliest of the narrative Gospels, the Gospel of Mark (c. 70 CE), together with the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, portrays Jesus of Nazareth primarily as a Jewish teacher and a prophetic figure, and possibly the Messiah (although most Jews would disagree).
In these texts, Jesus prays to God and refers to God as ‘Father’, yet he distinguishes himself from God. For example, he says, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.’ His central message is the Kingdom of God, not himself as an object of worship.
Titles that are sometimes thought to imply divinity, such as ‘Son of God’ or ‘Son of Man’, did not necessarily mean ‘God’ in first-century Judaism. ‘Son of God’ could refer to a king or a chosen servant of God, while ‘Son of Man’ could refer to a human figure or an apocalyptic agent.
Therefore, in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus appears to be closely related to God’s mission, but not identical to God.
If you cultivate a rose to look completely different from other roses, it is still a rose.
The problem is with our exceptionalism, assuming ‘category errors’ with no proof that it is any different except in the sophistication of an idea.
I have no problem with the sophistication and the extraordinary work that scribes undertook during the Babylonian Captivity to give the defeated tribes a national identity and a tradition that even survived the diaspora. I have great respect for where the tradition has gone since, but it began as a national narrative.
I also see the Christian tradition growing in the ground of Neo-Plantonism and loosing to a large degree its Aramaic roots, which culturally is quite okay. It is when we claim that this development was totally unique that I have my problems.
The sophistication of these traditions struggled with power structures that tried to use them to validate their policies throughout history. For scientists who have a grasp of historical development and no need for a divine source, this could be ample reason to reject the claims of Christianity as anything more than a cultural construct.
Thanks for your detailed explanation why you see the origin of consciousness so vital. It helps in understanding your point.
What is perhaps the strongest point is related to premise 5.
I seriously doubt the claim that billions have really seen spirits of dead persons but even a much smaller number demands some sort of explanation. I do not think that biologically based mental ‘hallucinations’ are a sufficient explanation for all of these encounters. There seems to be something more involved.
The rest of the points are mainly such where I disagree.
The truthfulness of claims does not depend on the origin of consciousness. Whatever the origin is, false remains false and truth remains truth. What witnesses tell is not dependent on the origin of consciousness.
The claims in the NT are not dependent on the origin of consciousness. God can speak, show visions and reveal truths independent of the origin of consciousness. Jesus can be observed in a similar manner.
We can be deceived by our own brains but that is true independent of the origin of consciousness. An immaterial origin does not protect us from false conclusions and beliefs. Assumed encounters with divine are in a similar manner either true or false, or alternatively, the encounter may be basically true but our interpretation about the observation may be false or mislead to the point that it becomes twisted (at least partly false).
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