Reading for 2025 (no further)

The title of this post is, I admit, a bit cryptic. You’ll have look back at this January post to get it. But having tee’d up my reading for the year, all neatly piled up, I thought it was only fair to say something in retrospect about it. Then next year (i.e. next week) I’ll say something about my plans for 2026. Only one item will appear in both piles and it is foundational metaphorically and physically. My Greek New Testament has been well used (if not the “Intermediate Greek Grammar” that also appeared with it). I’ve carried on trying to read part of my daily Bible reading in Greek (2025 was a New Testament year), before switching to English, as well as with my weekly reading group in which we’ve mostly been reading John’s writings. Again, because it’s the Tyndale reader’s edition, I’ve benefitted from the help given on each page, which saves me reaching too often for my copy of BDAG (if you know, you know), which was a 2025 birthday present. Currently Tyndale House in Cambridge, whose efforts produced this version of the Greek NT, are expanding and upgrading their library facilities. More power to their elbow. They do vital work that is of continuing benefit to the wider church.

My big “theological reading project” for the year was N. T. Wright’s “Christian Origins and the Question of God”. As before, the idea was to read a little bit every day and knock off the whole thing over the year. And very useful it has been too. Even when the material is hard, and the language a bit convoluted, Wright is always an educational, and even occasionally an entertaining, read. The early volumes have been a really helpful in understanding the intellectual background (not to say ferment) of second temple Judaism which is the wider context into which Jesus steps and Paul later appears. The main thrust of much of this is that this is (unsurprisingly) a Jewish context, something that some Christians (or at least some theologians) have at various points attempted to extinguish from the reality that is the history. Right at the centre of it all is the middle volume (“The Resurrection of the Son of God”), which must stand as one of the best explorations of the resurrection ever written (at least in English) and quite a lot else besides. Some of this material even turned out to be relevant to my other big project of the year (of which more below). The final volumes focus on Paul and his theology; although what theology, his or anyone else’s, actually is turns out to be a tricky question). One of the main themes is again that Paul doesn’t suddenly stop being Jewish and then determines to set up some rival “religion” (although what constitutes a religion also turns out to be quite tricky). Rather, he comes to the startling conclusion that Jesus, albeit the crucified Jesus, has been demonstrated to be the promised Messiah (by the resurrection), has fulfilled one set of promises long made to Israel by their covenant making, covenant keeping, creator God, and has inaugurated the fulfilment of anther set. And to stop uppity Gentiles like me becoming too cocky, I should just remember that I’m the odd branch that has been grafted into a Jewish rootstock. Interesting to read against the background of the recent antisemitic atrocities in Manchester and Bondi Beach. Having succeeded in reading through to the end, I’m going to miss my daily dose of N.T.!

I did plan some “lighter” reading in the form of Hillary Mantell’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy. This was inspired by the BBC adaption of course. It turns out to be a sort of mixture of history and theology. Alas, it turned out no to be “light” enough. I did get to the end of the first book in the trilogy but then I gave up. Mantell is of course a Booker Prize winner; that should have warned me. History I like, and theology I’m committed to. Historical theology (which I suppose you could argue is what N.T. was writing and what I enjoyed reading in the form of Calvin’s Institutes last year) I have enjoyed. There is some historical fiction I’ve enjoyed (I learned all about the Napoleonic wars from Denis Wheatly’s “Roger Brook” stories) but not so much this. I might have another go at Cromwell in 2026, but no promises.

At the top of my 2025 pile was some of the reading that was necessary for a paper I was writing on neuroscience (my former interest) and theology. Some of this was to do with basic philosophical problems that arise when we consider what we are as persons (eg are we made of one kind of stuff which is only physical or is it more complicated than that?), and some were taken up with previous theological responses to what assumed to be the inescapable philosophical consequences of the advances in neuroscience over the last fifty years. Some of those responses left a lot to be desired. It still astonishes me that some in theology fell for the line that the only valid questions are scientific questions and therefore only science can give valid answers. This is basically to make an a priori commitment to a particular form of materialism (only physical stuff exists) which makes explaining things like money and football scores inexplicable in any useful way. And of course it rules as invalid the question “does God exist?” assuming you take God to name an entity that is immaterial. You no longer have to prove He doesn’t exist, because you’ve already decided the issue. There are many supporters of such a position. What is interesting is that, however large that number used to be, it is almost certainly declining. This kind of view leaves unexplored lots of things that actually we are all very aware of including God Himself. You can only go on for so long telling people that questions about such things are invalid. Materialism is its various forms is increasingly viewed as being inadequate (see further here).

Having done lots of reading round the topic I wrote my paper and submitted it. One reviewer loved it, one hated it, and the third thought that what I had produced was good as far as it went, but that I had ignored the important topic of “neurotheology”. So, I had to do more reading, and a bit of writing, and submit a revision. Such exercises are always akin to a negotiation. Whether I’ve done enough for the editor remains to be seen.

Perhaps one day what I’ve written will be on someone else’s reading list. More on my 2026 reading pile shortly.

Theology and its mojo

I noted previously that the great materialist project that dominated thinking about who we are as persons (and much else) may be, in Mary Midgely’s word, “fraying”(Midgley 2014, 14). This is seen specifically in avowedly materialist attempts, emanating from the neurosciences, to give a rigorously physical/material account of our conscious, internal, subjective, first-person states (i.e. mental states), within a materialist metaphysical framework that claims that not only is this doable, but once done there will be nothing left to say about who/what we are. The problem is, the science is basically confused and the metaphysical claims seem suffused with overreach (for reasons discussed here). But might theology (leaving to one side for the moment what is meant by theology) have something to offer in this space?

First, a step back to what seems like a different time (i.e. the last quarter of the twentieth century). Within the broadly evangelical camp, some, like theologian Joel Green and philosopher Nancy Murphy (both influential voices from Fuller Seminary), viewed science, specifically neuroscience (and explicitly in Green’s case Churchlandian neurophilosophy) as having a role in framing their views of human ontology, requiring a degree of reinterpretation of classic theological texts and teaching (Green 2008, 16). Now it is clearly true that neuroscience has an important contribution to make to our self-understanding (particularly with regard to our present embodied state), but they appeared to hand to neuroscience (or particular implications that were argued to flow from it) an overarching authority, allowing it to be an arbiter of what can, and what cannot, be said. This seems to be complimentary to the approach of other materialists/physicalists who went much further and argued that science in general, and with regards to human human ontology that neuroscience in particular, were able to provide, by themselves, a full understanding of who we are, what the universe is, and what our place in it is. Outside theology, there was a reaction to such claims, which were criticised in the general case as scientism, and in the specific case of neuroscience as “neurohype” and “neuromania” (Midgley 1994, 108; 2014, 5; Tallis 2011; Lilienfeld et al. 2017). Another aspect of the reaction is the claim that in the twenty-first century “[w]e are witnessing a resurgence in substance dualism” partly because “promissory materialism” has not delivered an explanation of everything, including consciousness (Rickabaugh and Moreland 2024, 5–6). Given these observations and the “fraying” described by Midgley, might it be that far from being irrelevant and to be eliminated by the materialist project (claims that emanated from scientists like Crick on one hand, and philosophers like the Churchlands on the other), theology is in a position to make a positive contribution?

If theology is to make such a contribution then “it cannot allow its agenda and suppositions to be determined by current theories of mind or brain any more than than by the prevalent sociological, philosophical, or cultural analyses of personhood”; there needs to be clarity “about what is proper to the theological and scientific fields of enquiry respectively” (Torrance 2004, 213,214). This is a view obviously at odds with, among others, Crick, summarised in the final chapter of “The Astonishing Hypothesis” which had the intriguing title of “Dr Crick’s Sunday Morning Service” (Crick 1994, 255–63). Writing of religious beliefs, rather than theology (but in Crick’s view they surely amounted to the same thing), he asserted that “by scientific standards, they are based on evidence so flimsy that only an act of blind faith can make them acceptable”; “true answers are usually far from those of conventional religions. If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong” (Crick 1994, 258). Hardly a recipe for a fruitful dialogue. But some thirty plus years after this was written neither should it be assumed to be representative (e.g. see Rodzeń and Polak 2025 and the various contributions in the Special Issue they introduce).

Theological anthropology developed in a number of ways during the twentieth century and in one interesting respect it is Karl Barth who figures predominantly and whose influence continues to be important (Anderson 1982, 18; Torrance 2004, 207). Barth grounded his anthropology in christology, a move he characterised himself as “deviating from tradition” (see Skaff 2019, 186). Cortez, who examined the mind/brain debate (including Murphy’s non-reductive physicalism) in detail, claimed that “the significance of this christological shift … cannot be overstated. Indeed a growing number of Christian theologians locate modernity’s inability to understand human nature in the fundamentally misguided attempt to derive a complete picture of the human person independently of the perspective provided by the person of Jesus Christ” (Cortez 2008, 4). With regard to Murphy, Cortez notes that there was a movement in the opposite direction, explicitly working from the implications of the mind/brain debate (configured within a framework provided by neuroscience) to christology, with no consideration of movement from christology to anthropology (Cortez 2008, 5; quoting from Murphy 1998, 23).

Christology is, of course, a theological construct, not a scientific or neuroscientific one. It is examined and developed using theological tools and methods. It can of course all become very technical. But this is just as true of modern science. The relative inaccessibility of the cutting edge of where science is at any one time is not taken to provide a reason for it to be dismissed as untrue or unbelievable just because it is only truly accessible to professional practitioners. For those whose expertise is not theological to make claims about theological constructs being intrinsically unbelievable or irrelevant (essentially claims like Crick’s) out of ignorance about appropriate tools, methods, data, history and so on, would be just as ridiculous. But this is what has been going on for a while and has had far more credibility as an approach than it ever deserved.

For those wedded to the conflict metaphor for the interaction between science and theology, as representing inevitably conflicting ways of looking at reality, such developments within theology (like christological anthropology) will simply be taken to indicate the continuation of the conflict. But the conflict metaphor has long been acknowledged by historians of science as a polemical Victorian myth, albeit with some recent popular proponents (Russell 1985; Harrison 2017). Precisely because christological anthropologies spring from theology doing a theological task using appropriate theological methods, the categories involved are distinct from those of neuroscience. But this also means that they can be related to contemporary debates which are usually configured exclusively in terms of neuroscience and brain functions in interesting ways. It is significant that the incarnation (a thoroughly theological concept) has been argued to be compatible with both physicalism and dualism (two very different approaches to the mind/brain problem) by different proponents in the mind/brain debate (Cortez 2008, 5; see footnote 12). But it takes careful work and thought to relate the incarnational and the neural, and much of this work remains to be done. There are other intriguing convergences between christologcial anthropology and developments in neuroscience. In his discussion of “personhood”, Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas argued for the fundamental ontological importance of “a movement of communion”, where ontological identity is to be found “only in a being which is free from the boundaries of the ‘self’”(Zizioulas 1975). This strongly relational view, which both looks back to Barth and is consistent with the work of a long list of key figures in recent theological anthropology, parallels and potentially compliments developments in neuroscience represented by research into “theory of mind” and social cognition both of which stress the relational (Torrance 2004, 208; Brüne and Brüne-Cohrs 2006; Frith 2008). How deep this convergence goes, also requires work and thought.

In gaining a rounded understanding of ourselves, there is clearly an important role for neuroscience to play. It is able provide information from a third-person perspective about the physical brain mechanisms involved in the generation of human experience (now explicitly including conscious experience), how these mechanisms develop, the ways in which they change as we age and about aspects of what happens when eventually our embodied existence fades. But this information is partial not exhaustive, it generates a particular kind of map guiding our self-understanding. Theology has the role of providing another kind of map for some of the same terrain. The challenge is in aligning the different maps, not assuming a priori that one is right and one is wrong (Midgley 2005).

Materialism is fraying, theology is perhaps getting its mojo back. Just as well. There’s work to do.

Anderson, Ray S. 1982. On Being Human: Essays in Theological Anthropology. Eerdmans.

Brüne, Martin, and Ute Brüne-Cohrs. 2006. “Theory of Mind—Evolution, Ontogeny, Brain Mechanisms and Psychopathology.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 30 (4): 437–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2005.08.001.

Cortez, Marc. 2008. Embodies Souls, Ensouled Bodies. T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology. T &T Clark.

Crick, F. H. C. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Macmillan.

Frith, Chris D. 2008. “Social Cognition.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 363: 2033–39.

Harrison, Peter. 2017. The Territories of Science and Religion. Paperback edition. University of Chicago Press.

Lilienfeld, Scott O, Elizabeth Aslinger, Julia Marshall, and Sally Satel. 2017. “Neurohype: A Field Guide to Exaggerated Brain-Based Claims.” In The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics. Routledge.

Midgley, M. 2014. Are You an Illusion? Heretics (Durham, England). Acumen. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hHtnQEACAAJ.

Midgley, Mary. 1994. Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and It Meaning. Paperback edition. Routledge.

Midgley, Mary. 2005. “Mapping Science: In Memory of John Ziman.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 (3): 195–97.

Murphy, Nancey. 1998. “Human Nature: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues.” In Whatever Happened to the Soul. Fortress Press.

Rickabaugh, Brandon, and J.P. Moreland. 2024. The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contrmporary Substance Dualism. John Wiley and Sons.

Rodzeń, Jacek, and Paweł Polak. 2025. “Introduction to This Religions Special Issue: Natural Sciences as a Contemporary Locus Theologicus.” Religions 16 (8). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081020.

Russell, Colin R. 1985. Crosscurrents: Interactions Between Science and Faith. IVP.

Skaff, Jeffrey. 2019. “Barth on Theological Anthropology.” The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, 185–96.

Tallis, Raymond. 2011. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Acumen Publishing.

Torrance, Alan J. 2004. “What Is a Person?” In From Cells to Souls and Beyond. Eerdmans.

Zizioulas, John D. 1975. “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood.” Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (5): 401–47

Barely conscious(ness)

You may not have been conscious of it, but big arguments have been swirling around the issue of consciousness (for the example that prompted this post see here). Science had, then didn’t have and now again has big problems with consciousness. You know an argument is in trouble when its starting point is the denial of probably the one thing we are all aware of (at least when we are awake and healthy) – our consciousness. Descartes was so sure of his that he based his philosophy on it (the famous “I think [doubt] therefore I am”). But you might be surprised to learn that for a good chunk of the 20^th century in science, a good chunk of scientists were convinced that either it did it not exist or if it did, it didn’t “do” anything. They were the behaviourists, represented by B. F. Skinner (he of the infamous box). Consciousness was “nothing but” (ie reducible to) behaviour (by which they primarily meant movement) or propensities to behave. Don’t feel any need to understand any this (a notion which clearly assumes some degree of consciousness on your part!), because such views didn’t last long into the second half of the twentieth century. Behaviourist schemes clearly didn’t work, and the starting point was in any case fatally flawed.

But historically there had been an ongoing struggle to accommodate subjective, first-person, mental states (consciousness) within a thoroughly empirical (scientific) approach to our understanding of ourselves. Those devoted to the nineteenth century theory/myth of the conflict between science (good) and theology (bad), didn’t want to provide any space for the immaterial (whether soul or mind – for current purposes assume that both words name the same thing). But not having a satisfying material explanation for what we are all most aware of was a bit of a problem. If claiming that things like mental states did not exist was not viable, what to do? Well, assuming there was a thoroughly material explanation for our private interior self (potentially another fatally flawed assumption), given the powerful new tools of neuroscience such phenomena had to be explicable in terms of what was going on in the brain (that clearly material lump of stuff inside our heads). So there arose an empirical subdiscipline within neuroscience, that of “consciousness studies”.

Writing 10 years ago in the inaugural editorial of the journal “Neuroscience of Consciousness” the editors credited a 1990 paper by Crick and Koch as marking “the rebirth of consciousness science as a serious exercise”(Seth et al. 2015; Crick and Koch 1990). The publication of the new journal reflected “the maturity of this rigorous and empirically grounded approach to the science of subjective experience”. While they themselves made no claim that this was necessarily the only available approach to subjective experience, such a claim had already appeared in Crick’s book, published the previous year (Crick 1994). Crick and Koch claimed in their paper that “Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness” and avoided a “precise definition”. This, along with other knotty issues, was left to one side “otherwise much time can be frittered away in fruitless argument”, implicitly a criticism of what had gone before. Philosophy (and certainly theology) had had its day. It was now over to science to explain the previously inexplicable, even consciousness (see Chemero and Silberstein 2008). This particular body swerve would prove to be costly.

Now, thirty five years on from the “rebirth of consciousness science”, where stands the project that had reached “maturity” ten years ago? Franken and colleagues recently published the results of a survey of consciousness researchers who attended two consecutive annual meetings of the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness (established in 1994 and later the sponsor of Neuroscience of Consciousness) to investigate “the theoretical and methodological foundations, common assumptions, and the current state of the field of consciousness research” (Francken et al. 2022). Among the issues they found “a lack of consensus regarding the definition and most promising theory of consciousness” and “that many views and opinions currently coexist in the consciousness community. Moreover, individual respondents appear to hold views that are not always completely consistent from a theoretical point of view”. Lest it be felt that this is a rather slim basis on which to form a view as to the current state of the field, Seth and Bayne (2022) reported in a recent extensive review that “in the case of consciousness, it is unclear how current theories relate to each other, or whether they can be empirically distinguished”. They recommended “the iterative development, testing and comparison of theories of consciousness” . Franken et al (2022) used ten different theoretical constructs in their survey, Seth and Bayne (2022) identified a “selection” of twenty-two “theories of consciousness” (see their Table 1) which they grouped into four broad categories and Kuhn (limiting himself to “materialism” theories) identified fourteen neurobiological theories, to which he added lists of philosophical (N=12), electromagnetic (7) and computational/informational (4) theories (Kuhn 2024). Confused? Well, it turns out the field of consciousness studies is.

An attempt to follow Seth and Bayne’s advice, using a “large-scale adversarial collaboration” to experimentally compare predictions made by two of the major competing theories of consciousness (“global neuronal workspace theory”, GNWT vs “integrated informational theory”, IIT) recently reported results in Nature (Ferrante et al. 2025; see also the accompanying Nature Editorial). The evidence that emerged partially supported and partially challenged both theories. However, the aftermath is more revealing. In response to the preprint and media coverage of the paper (the actual Nature paper was submitted for publication in June 2023, accepted for publication in March 2025 and published in April 2025) a long list of researchers (including recognised leaders in neuroscience) put their names to an open letter on the PsyArXiv preprint server condemning the exercise as flawed, calling IIT “pseudoscience” and objecting to its characterisation as a leading candidate theory for explaining consciousness at all (Fleming, et al. 2023). Proponents of GNWT also called into question the discussion of the results and the conclusions drawn (Naccache et al. 2025). All of this suggests that what flowed from Crick and Koch’s avoidance of a definition of consciousness was basic conceptual confusion. But many had claimed that this was the problem at the time; this was precisely the charge made against the field by the philosopher Peter Hacker not long after its “rebirth” (Bennett and Hacker 2003, 239–44; see also Hacker 2012). Nobody is sure what it is they’re talking about, and even those who do claim to know what they mean usually agree that the have no way of measuring the “it” they are clear about. So the next time you read a headline about “understanding” consciousness, just be aware – we don’t.

It’s not just the state of the specific scientific sub-field of consciousness research that appears to have problems and confusions. Concerns have emerged from within the wider materialist camp. Some more history is in order. The philosopher Thomas Nagel is perhaps best known for his classic paper “What is it like to be a bat?”; with regard to the problem of consciousness, the philosopher Patricia Churchland called this paper a “watershed articulation” (Nagel 1974; Churchland 1996). The problem which Nagel drew attention to was the one left by the demise of the behaviourists; the “subjective character of experience” (the what-is-it-like-to-be-ness) was not captured “by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental”. Materialist accounts of thinking people left something vital out of the account. So he suggested that what was needed were new studies of the subjective and the mental partially answered in subsequent development of consciousness studies described above.

But that was then, what about now? Advances in neuroscience have definitely occurred. With all that  we know now (all those lovely coloured brain scans, snapshots of what goes on while people think), surely a thoroughly materialist account of us, which leaves the concept of the immaterial (be it mind or soul) lying redundant in its wake, is possible? Or at least given such progress, we should be in a position to see clearly how in principal it might be possible. Writing in 2012, Nagel was, if anything, more concerned than he was in the 70’s. Consciousness remained one of the major sticking points causing his concern: “The fundamental elements and laws of physics and chemistry have been inferred to explain the behaviours of the inanimate world. Something more is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking creatures..” (Nagel 2012, 20). And yet his concerns went beyond the existence of (as yet unexplained) consciousness to the wider materialist project: “The inadequacies of the naturalistic and reductionist world picture seem to me to be real”(Nagel 2012, 22). He did not find theism (the “polar opposite” of materialism) “any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view”, but was having a problem trying to imagine naturalistic accounts that were able to accommodate previously excluded elements like consciousness (or purpose, belief, love and the like). He concluded by accepting as conceivable that “the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations” (Nagel 2012, 128). The philosopher Mary Midgley took Nagel’s argument (along with those made by others) to provide evidence that the “credo of materialism” was “beginning to fray around the edges” (Midgley 2014, 14). Things haven’t improved since.

Does any of this matter? On one level, not really. You are still you, even although there is no scientific explanation for you in material terms. At least no one is now claiming that because of the lack of that explanation “you” don’t exist. Fundamentally, of course, I would be argue that science with its third-party, observational statements, which necessarily leave out of the account things like purpose, hope, love, agency and the like (ie things that really matter to us), can only ever provide a partial account of what we are as “persons” (something most scientist are clear about – usually). As Midgley and many others have argued the argument that only science defines or explains important stuff, including what we are as persons, is a monstrous overreach. Such claims are still occasionally made, but this view too is “fraying”.

But there are of course other sources of data, other (complimentary) ways of reasoning, other views of who and what we are as persons (something I touched on previously). If the materialist program is faltering, these need to be heard again. Wonder what (the decidedly immaterial) God thinks?

[PS: I don't normally provide references to the literature in these posts, but as I happened to have them to hand, I thought it would be churlish not to....]

Bennett, Maxwell R, and Peter Michael Stephan Hacker. 2003. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwell.

Chemero, Anthony, and Michael Silberstein. 2008. “After the Philosophy of Mind: Replacing Scholasticism with Science*.” Philosophy of Science 75 (1): 1–27. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.1086/587820.

Churchland, Patricia S. 1996. “The Hornswoggle Problem.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (5–6): 402–8.

Crick, F. H. C. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Macmillan.

Crick, Francis, and Christof Koch. 1990. “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness.” 2 (263–275): 203.

Ferrante, Oscar, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin, et al. 2025. “Adversarial Testing of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theories of Consciousness.” Nature 642 (8066): 133–42. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08888-1.

Fleming, S.M, Chris D Frith, M Goodale, et al. 2023. “The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness as Pseudoscience.” Preprint, PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zsr78.

Francken, Jolien C, Lola Beerendonk, Dylan Molenaar, et al. 2022. “An Academic Survey on Theoretical Foundations, Common Assumptions and the Current State of Consciousness Science.” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2022 (1): niac011. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niac011.

Hacker, P. M. S. 2012. “The Sad and Sorry History of Consciousness: Being, among Other Things, a Challenge to the ‘Consciousness-Studies Community.’” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 70: 149–68.

Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. 2024. “A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications.” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (August): 28–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2023.12.003.

Midgley, M. 2014. Are You an Illusion? Heretics (Durham, England). Acumen. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hHtnQEACAAJ.

Naccache, Lionel, Claire Sergent, Stanislas Dehaene, Xia-Jing Wang, Michele Farisco, and Jean-Pierre Changeux. 2025. “GNW Theoretical Framework and the ‘Adversarial Testing of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theories of Consciousness.’” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2025 (1): niaf037. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf037.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83: 435–50.

Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.

Seth, Anil K., and Tim Bayne. 2022. “Theories of Consciousness.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23 (7): 439–52. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00587-4.

Seth, Anil K., Biyu J. He, and Jakob Hohwy. 2015. “Editorial.” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2015 (1): niv001. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niv001

On different types of screwdrivers...

 

I am not what you would call a DIY aficionado, as my family can (and often do) testify. Yet even I know that there are different types of screws. Mind you, I didn’t realise there were quite so many types as I discovered when I went looking. So it turns out the world of screws is much more complicated and varied than I had thought. And this means there are a fascinatingly large number of screwdrivers required to deal with all these different screws. And of course different screws have different uses. The tiny screws (and their appropriate screwdrivers) that are used in watches, would be entirely inappropriate for holding my bookshelves together. Should we ever decide to down-size, and should I have to dismantle my rather well-made bookshelves, I will be thoroughly stuck if all I have to hand is a watchmaker’s screwdriver. If I were stupid (or distraught) enough to attempt to dismantle my bookshelves with a watchmaker’s screwdriver, all that I would succeed in doing would be to ruin the screwdriver. You need the right tools for the right job.

As with screws (and screwdrivers) so with the universe. It’s complicated and multi-layered. It is composed of different sorts of things that belong to different classes of things (and some that probably aren’t “things” at all). Asteroids, planets and stars are at the same time different and similar. While asteroids (or at least many of them) are composed of rocks of various compositions, stars (according to NASA) are “giant balls of hot gas”. Some planets are made of rock, some are mainly gases and fluids. So far, so different. But at a certain level of abstraction they are all composed of atoms organised in certain ways. Stars are composed of hydrogen and helium (at least for the most part). In the case of our own planet, which we obviously know best, it is composed of atoms of iron and nickel (in alternating solid and liquid layers) surrounded by silicate rocks (rich in iron and magnesium) topped off by a solid crust. What sort of tool could be used to study such things? Well, much of this particular type of stuff (at least of Earth) can be observed directly or indirectly. It can be measured, poked and prodded. Different bits can be collected and compared. So, at a basic level, this kind of stuff here on Earth, and what turns out to be the fairly similar stuff beyond Earth, can be studied using the tools of the physical sciences. But problems arise when we apply these tools inappropriately.

What kind of thing is a beetle or a chihuahua or an elephant? Clearly, just like a planet or a star, all of these can be thought of as material objects, and as such are composed of atoms. And yet it turns out that certain atoms, organised in a certain way, give rise to new types of things, or at least new types of properties, that don’t seen to be well suited to study by the physical sciences. So if you took the beetle, ground it up, did a chemical analysis, and worked out the proportions of different types of atoms, would you know everything there was to know about the beetle? Of course not. And arguably you will have missed all the really important things. Because the tools of the physical sciences aren’t enough. You need the tools of the life sciences. And you need a whole new array of concepts, like the concept of information to explain what that was encoded in the atoms of the beetle’s DNA, and with it concepts like replication, protein synthesis, ion transfer, let alone concepts like homeostasis, locomotion and reproduction. All of these, and whole new sets of tools, are needed to study beetles (and chihuahuas etc).

But what about persons? Think about a single individual human being. We could again simply grind them up, and work out their chemical constituents (65% oxygen, 18% carbon and so on; see here). As far as atoms go, these are exactly the same sort as those encountered in planets and beetles. And yet this is perhaps an even less satisfactory account than that of the chemical constitution of the beetle. So we could apply all those additional tools of the life sciences. And yet would we really want to claim we understood that particular person? Because we would still be missing a number of their vital aspects. Assuming the individual we have selected is just like you and me, then we know that as well as being an object (a thing made of stuff that can be prodded and poked), they are a subject. They have an interior life and a personal perspective, the have motives, desires and beliefs; we know this, because it is true of us. They (and we) will come to a time when this ceases to be the case (i.e. when they are dead). At that time our physical analysis will largely still stand (at least for a short period). But we all know that in a real sense they (and we when it happens to us) will be fundamentally different from how they were in life. Something that was present will at that time no longer be present. So it looks like we now need a further and distinct set of tools and concepts, including those of neurology and psychology. But what about all that first-person, personal perspective stuff? What is a motive, purpose, desire or belief? What kind of tools do we need to study these?

It gets more complicated still. Because the the odd thing about people is that usually they do not exist in isolation and only function as individual specimens. All the healthy human individuals ever encountered, have existed and do exist within a dense network of relationships with other human individuals (and occasionally non-human ones). If we don’t study this aspect of being, with yet another set of appropriate tools, we will miss something vital. And emerging from and produced by these networks comes lots of stuff we haven’t classified yet. Things like football scores, paper money, political manifestos and poems. What kind of things are these? What sort of tools do we need to investigate them? It’s clear that the tool of the physical sciences that we started off with have little or no purchase on these “things”.

Which of these various levels is the most important? Which type of description and set of tools is the most useful. The real answer is that it depends. One could probably make an argument for each one of them in turn. But if the experts at any one level were to claim that only their descriptions and explanations, generated by the tools appropriate for their level of analysis, were the true ones, and all the others were somehow wrong, or illusions, or were so unimportant that they could be ignored, we would quietly smile and assume they were after a big pay rise. What we wouldn’t do is take this type of claim seriously. It would be as bizarre as insisting I can tackle any type of screw with a watchmaker's screwdriver.

And we haven’t got to arguably the most interesting and important level of all yet and its appropriate  tools. Theology will have to wait for a different post.

All at sea….

One of the more provocative and influential TV series produced about “religion” was aired by the BBC back in 1984. "Sea of Faith" was presented by an Anglican priest and academic, Don Cupitt, who died in January at the age of 90. It was part personal travelogue detailing a journey from orthodox belief to technical atheism and part historical romp explaining (and in some ways excusing) that very journey. Cupitt argued that the journey was inevitable, and he had felt personally compelled to undertake it, but it paralleled one that had been undertaken by society generally. One of the implications (actually explications in large measure) was that for Christian belief either in its individual or collective forms (i.e. the church) to survive in the modern world it had to change out of all recognition. Because, as it turned out, God didn’t exist (and had never existed) as an objectively real being, Jesus was (merely) a great and inspirational teacher (but obviously couldn’t be God), and religion, particularly Christianity, was simply a system of human ethics (rather like other systems of human ethics). I watched the series at the time – I had just embarked on my own journey as a PhD student. Candidly, I wasn’t impressed. Or rather perhaps I should say I wasn’t impressed with the argument (such as it was) and conclusions. Cupitt, as may of his obituaries have noted, was “a charismatic lecturer..an engaging speaker”; “a kind and encouraging teacher” who “never spoke an uncharitable word”. And in both his approach and conclusions he was neither alone not unique. His theological thrust was a familiar one from many whose thinking developed in the 60s and 70s. It was similar in many ways to that of Jon Robinson (of “Honest to God” fame) and David Jenkins (he of “more than a conjuring trick with bones”). Both were, interestingly, like Cupitt (until 2008), members of the Church of England. But rather than slip into Monty Python parody mode (“what’s the Church of England ever done for us?”), I got to wonder whether a misunderstanding of science might have been partly responsible for Cupitt's undoing.

I was intrigued to learn that, like others in theology (Alistair McGrath comes to mind), Cupitt initially set out to study science, originally studying “Natural Sciences” at Cambridge from 1952 to 1954. Science seems to loom large in bringing about the secularisation of (mainly) western thought as well as being a (the?) major reason why orthodox belief is no longer intellectually justifiable. But what he seems to have missed is that science and Christian belief were not seen as competitors by most actual practitioners of science until relatively recently. And the idea that there is an outright conflict between them is now accepted to be an invention of the late nineteenth century. It is mainly because the teaching of science in the English speaking world is so devoid of taking time to set it properly in its historical and philosophical context (to the detriment of many a science student and the scientists that they become) that we’ve had to endure the likes of the New Atheists and their ilk. It may be that Cupitt, having had a similar number perpetrated on him, was directed down what appears to be a false trail ending in the cul-de-sac of atheism. And the influence this then has on his approach to theology is to put him firmly in the camp of the capitulators, those who believe that in the light of the “triumph” of science, theology has to completely redefine its terms of trade. Because science, as it is legitimately practised, only deals in naturalistic and material categories, these are the only ones that are available to theology too. The problem is that theology’s object of study is (or should be) the infinite, immaterial God and his doings in the world. Something had to give. Many in theology seemed to decide, without too much argument, that what had to give was God, or at least anything like the orthodox teaching about God, as revealed in Scripture, debated and developed over 1800 years of providentially guided Christian thought.

To my mind this misunderstands and miss-states science, and it is an abuse of theology (and theologians ought to stop doing it). When I embarked on an experiment in my previous incarnation as a professional scientist I did so by seeking evidence to support or refute my current provisional explanation for the current object of study. In a recent series of experiments for example, the evidence in question was specific data (eye movement timings and such) collected in specific circumstances (the experiment). I was not after any kind of ultimate explanation of everything, and as in any experiment completely ignored lots of interesting phenomena that weren’t the focus of the experiment. In this particular experiment I was interested in a specific aspect of eye movement behaviour, but not really the personal motivation of my participants (beyond the £10 they received for participating). In a different experiment their motivation could have been the focus, but not in this particular one. Neither, as a scientist who is a Christian believer, was I pretending to be uncovering the activity of God in sustaining the particular part of His universe I was investigating, even although I believed (and still do) that He has revealed that He was active in precisely such a way. But neither my hypothesis (the provisional explanation I was investigating) nor my tools were appropriate for examining or explaining the mechanism of His sustaining activity. In fact I do not and did not posses such tools, but based my belief on His revealing the fact of His sustaining activity in His Word. To that extent my belief, like my science, was based on evidence albeit a different kind of evidence obtained in a different way. But there was no clash between these two different aspects of what was going on inside my head as a Christian scientist.

In my view the explanations generated by my particular experiment (to do with the measurement of how we stop ourselves doing things) were valid and useful. Whether this is really true will be demonstrated (or not) by the work of others and until then may be taken on trust or not. What they do not and cannot do is somehow trump what God has revealed about doing or not doing things; that’s a completely different box of frogs. To jump from the very limited perspective of the naturalistic explanations of science and claim that now theological explanations derived from revelation are overthrown is ridiculous. They are different approaches, even when applied to the same phenomena in this one material world.

Time has moved on since Cupitt’s TV series, and there is some evidence theology is getting its own mojo back. Some of the weaknesses of science as a human activity have come more into view (and that’s even before it is misapplied). Cupitt, who was clearly highly educated, intelligent and talented (and for all I know a really nice bloke), should have been able to work out that theology had its own domain and task. Dialogue with, not the hegemony of, science was what was required. But he didn’t get it and it left him all at sea.