Why There Almost Certainly Is a God by Ward Keith

Author:Ward, Keith [Ward, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2011-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

The Priority of Mind

The natural way to think of this, and the way that has been taken by the vast majority of classical philosophers, is to posit the simplest or most economical form of consciousness – namely, just one conscious mind that shapes or brings about the physical universe in order to actualize many emergent conscious states through a long, gradual process of development.

However conscious states come about, once they exist they require not just scientific explanation, but personal explanation. The God hypothesis, at its simplest, is the hypothesis that personal explanation is not reducible to scientific explanation, and that it is prior to scientific explanation. That is, the causal states and laws described by scientific explanation are ultimately to be explained in terms of the reasons that a thinking and feeling and acting mind could have for choosing them. They are chosen because they are, to some consciousness, of intrinsic desirability or goodness.

Put another way, mind is prior to matter. Mind causes matter to exist, as a means of bringing into being a set of states that are desired and enjoyed by that mind, or that can be desired and enjoyed by other minds that may form a shared community.

The God hypothesis proposes that there is a consciousness that does not depend on any material brain, or on any material thing at all. In this consciousness all possible worlds exist, though only as possible states that may or may not actually exist. The cosmic consciousness can evaluate these possible worlds in terms of their desirability – their beauty or elegance or fecundity, for example. Then, being actual, it can bring about desirable states and enjoy them.

God can, in other words, think of all possible turtles, can discern that many of them are interesting and beautiful, can decide to make some of them exist precisely because of that discernment, and then can just enjoy them for what they are. This provides an excellent reason for the existence of turtles – God enjoys them. And there is also an excellent reason for the existence of God – God has to exist if any turtles are to be possible at all (if there is to be a set of all possible turtles). All Platonic turtles necessarily exist in the mind of God, who will create some possible turtles for the sake of the value they have, because they are interesting and beautiful.

I think, therefore, that God is the best final explanation there can be for the universe. Indeed, if there is a final explanation for the universe, it virtually has to be God! The probability of this universe having the laws and constants it does is raised, as cosmologists generally say it is, by appeal to the exhaustive array of possible worlds that exist by necessity. But we can avoid the needless extravagance of saying that all these worlds actually exist by positing that they all exist in the mind of God, which is just one simple entity, not being composed of separable parts.

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