The God of the Signs - The Sign of Consciousness
[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]
How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe
Men given to philosophical inquiry have long posed the seminal cosmological question: Why does what is exist at all? In other words, why not nothing? Answers have generally fallen into two camps—the theological and the mystical. Either a Prime Mover (read “God”), at some point in the distant past, spontaneous caused the generation of matter ex nihilo, or the cosmos, existing in some form of material “eternity” without beginning or end, merely possesses self-creative potential of undefined origin. I have no desire here to argue systematically for the former view. Rather I wish to suggest that the Sign of Consciousness, even more than the Sign of Order, lays waste to the latter perspective, for Consciousness insists on asking a second question of the thinker, to wit: Even if the supposed “brute fact” of the physical world is assumed, how did such a world give rise to a creature capable of contemplating cosmogenesis, who can know and aspire to know about the essence of all things? This second question does not, of course, erase the profound, and precedent, difficulty proposed to the philosophical naturalist by the Sign of Order, namely the combined theoretical and empirical challenge of hypothesizing abiogenesis apart from the controlling effects of law (whether in the incipient nanoseconds of the Big Bang or in the sterilized environs of a modern laboratory). However, as the stumbling block proposed by Consciousness is a matter of pure, unadulterated logic, its mountainous bulk cannot be circumvented by an appeal to present scientific ignorance and the inevitable illumination of future discovery.
The syllogism is simple: Reason cannot have proceeded from unreason in the primordial cosmos (i.e. the bare processes of physics and chemistry), for the operation of unreason merely produces occasions and events with no inherent truth value (e.g. the acceleration of a particle acted upon by a force), not propositions of abstract knowledge that can be debated and tested by argument and experimentation (e.g. Newton’s second law, which suggests, subject to disproof, a universal relationship between that particle, the force which acts upon it, and the acceleration it experiences). Ergo, if man is capable of reasoning his way to some objective notion of truth (a suggestion necessarily assumed by every philosopher and scientist, even those who, in self-defeating fashion, contend for the view that no objective ground for truth exists), his capacity for such reason must have been imparted from a Reasoning Source, which Source is either aware of ultimate Truth or defines its standard. As I have described it, therefore, the Sign of Consciousness does not merely deliver the gifts of human self-awareness and curiosity about the world outside; it shouts from the hilltops about the original Mind by whose extraordinary genius the universe, in all its splendor and complexity, was created. Moreover, the Sign of Consciousness paves the way for the ratiocinating heart to reach out and touch, albeit transiently, the superabundant intelligence of God.
Next time: The Sign of Conscience
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