Reasons for Unbelief: Nothing requires a supernatural explanation

By Keith Parsons | 16 April 2025
Letters to a Free Country

(Image by Christel from Pixabay)

This is a continuation of my previous post on reasons for unbelief.

3. Nothing requires a supernatural explanation.

Twenty-six hundred years ago, a few men at the extreme eastern end of the Mediterranean had a crazy idea. These Greeks of the Ionian city of Miletus had this notion, unprecedented in human history, that the world could be explained on its own terms, without gods. That is, the arché, the origin and underlying nature of things could be found within phusis, within nature itself. If some ultimate stuff, say water or air, through a suitable natural process, could transform into the manifold objects of our experience, then we could explain the world without the importation of anthropomorphic deities. Twenty-six hundred years later we are continuing the Milesians quest, though the “stuffs” we posit are things like quantum fields and Higgs bosons and not air or water. We call this project of explaining natural things in natural terms “natural science.”

Natural science is the most successful intellectual enterprise of the human race. We have found that the staggering complexity of the world can be understood in terms of a manageable number of basic laws, entities, and principles. For instance, all of chemistry can be understood in terms of information that can be summarized on a small chart, called the periodic table of the elements, that can be hung on a wall. I have one on the wall of the office where I am working now, just to the right of my desk. Ninety-two natural atoms and their manifold interactions build a universe. Yet there are further layers of reality below the atom, where the properties of atoms are themselves explained in terms of even more fundamental things. Even the vast complexity of the living world is tamed by our theories of molecular genetics and evolution.

The great Victorian historian W.E.H. Lecky observed that many things previously thought to have a supernatural provenance have been found to be explicable in terms of natural law:

The whole history of physical science is one continued revelation of the reign of law. The same law that governs the motions of a grain of dust, or the light of the glowworm’s lamp, is shown to preside over the march of the most majestic planet or the fire of the most distant sun. Countless phenomena, which were for centuries universally believed to be the results of spiritual agency, portents of calamity, or acts of Divine vengeance, have been one by one by one explained, have been shown to arise from blind physical causes be capable of prediction, or amenable to human remedies (History of European Morals, vol. I, 353; 1955).

This was written in 1869, and the enormous accomplishments of science since then have only confirmed and strengthened Lecky‘s claim. Even when theories are rejected, like the luminiferous ether, they are replaced by better naturalistic theories. There is never—never—a reversion to a supernatural account. The fatuous failures of creationism and “intelligent design theory” to do so only reinforce this conclusion.

Such is the success of natural science that we may fairly ask, what is left for God to do? What do we need God to explain? A creator with nothing to do will soon fade into nonexistence, the disappearing grin of the cosmic Cheshire Cat. What is left for God to do? Atheists have a simple answer: Nothing.

4. Not everything has been explained, but . . . .

Of course, not everything has yet been explained. Might we not find a niche for God in those realms where science has not yet given an answer? Such a practice is disparagingly called the “God of the gaps” tactic. Gaps in armor of science are located, and God is put there. The problem is that science has a way of closing the gaps, and then God must beat a hasty and undignified retreat to find other gaps. To avoid God of the gaps fiascoes, God’s defenders need to show that there are things which in principle cannot be explained by even a completed natural science.

Like what? The phenomena of consciousness have often been offered as candidates for the permanently scientifically inexplicable. The distinctive features of consciousness are intentionality and qualia. Intentionality is the “aboutness” of mental states. Whether I am thinking of something real or a pure fantasy, my thoughts will have a mental object, something to which my awareness is directed. Qualia are those felt sensations that we have by the senses: the taste of honey, the sound of thunder, the feel of fine Corinthian leather, the smell of napalm in the morning (smells like victory).

Some philosophers have maintained that even a completed neuroscience, one that can explain every aspect of brain operation, will fail to explain why some complexes of neuronal activity are associated with the phenomena of consciousness. Allegedly, even if I understand everything about what goes on in my brain when I perceive royal blue, for instance, there will be no explanation of just why that qualitative state goes with that particular pattern of neuronal activity. All we will ever be able to say is that it does. This is called the “hard” problem of the philosophy of mind, and identifies an “explanatory gap” that science allegedly cannot close.

So, are qualia the wedge that can drive in God? If natural science cannot explain qualia, and if qualia must have an explanation, then something other than nature must explain them. Might we not posit a soul, a spiritual essence that, as a center of pure consciousness, can offer the first-person explanations that the third-person accounts of physical science cannot accommodate? If we admit souls, then God cannot be far behind, right?

Some philosophers have responded to the “hard” problem by denying the existence of qualia. This, to me, sounds like a desperate maneuver. I see no reason whatsoever not to say that there are qualia and that the brain creates them. That the brain produces qualia—and all of the other phenomena of consciousness—can be known even if we do not understand why certain patterns of neural activity are associated with certain qualia. If neuroscience can show that subjects experience certain qualitative sensations when, and only when, their brains evince certain distinctive patterns of activity (a possibility proponents of the “hard problem” concede), then won’t we have all the evidence we need to say that such brain activity is both necessary and sufficient for the qualitative experience? (BTW, it is hard for me to see how anyone can read the brilliant works of the late, great neurologist Oliver Sacks and not understand that who we are and what we are—our personhood—is brain function.)

The defenders of the “hard problem” would regard the above paragraph as far too hasty. They would say that I ignore the deeper problem. The real problem is that neuroscience does not even have the vocabulary to offer a possible explanation of qualia. Neuroscience, like all natural science, explains in terms of entities, laws, and processes that are describable in objective, third-person terms. Qualia, on the other hand, are expressible only in irreducibly qualitative, subjective, first-person terms. Thus, there seems to be no way, in principle, that neuroscience, however advanced, could account for qualia. All it can ever do is note correlations between brain states and qualitative states.

First, such a priori proscriptions on what science allegedly can and cannot explain have a long history of coming to bad ends. As soon as someone draws a line in the sand and declares “Beyond this science shall not pass,” scientists gleefully jump over the line. No one can predict the explanatory resources of future science. Newtonian theory had no resources for explaining gravity. Physicists could say with great accuracy how bodies behaved in gravitational fields, but could not explain why massive bodies would exert such attraction. “Hypotheses non fingo,” said Newton, that is, he would offer no explanation of gravity, but only show how it works (the inverse square law). Then, in the twentieth century, general relativity explained gravity in terms of the warping of space around massive bodies. As science advances it adds the explanatory vocabulary it needs.

Second, if brains cannot explain qualia, a fortiori neither can souls. A soul is . . . what? It appears describable only in terms of negations: It is not physical, it is not located in space, it is not detectable by physical means, and so forth. It is utterly mysterious; its nature and operations are occult. It supposedly can interact with physical substances, but (back to the famous Cartesian “interaction problem”) the nature of that interaction must remain inexplicable. Somehow (inexplicably), during earthly life, an individual soul is affixed to one physical body and its perceptions are correlated with stimuli from that body. Step on a tack with your foot and your soul feels pain. So, as is alleged for neuroscientists, soul-theorists must posit an inexplicable correlation between physiology and feeling. Soul-theory has no vocabulary for explaining qualia because it has no vocabulary for explaining anything. And never will.

Conclusion

Finally, there is no reason whatsoever to deny that consciousness has evolved just like every other human faculty. When challenged to account for the perfection of the human eye by the incremental process of natural selection, Darwin pointed to the numerous grades of light detection in the natural world—from the protist’s humble eyespot to the human eye. Likewise, we now know that plants and fungi as well as animals have sophisticated means of acquiring information from the environment and from each other. The processing of information shades into sentience which shades into consciousness. My cat certainly experiences qualia, and much of her behavior is simply and plausibly explained in terms of belief/desire psychology. So, do we attribute souls to (some) animals? Which ones? Where, between oysters and bonobos, do we drive the golden spike to demarcate what physiology can do from what only souls can do? I see no prospect for a non-arbitrary answer.

So, in barest outline, here are what I take to be good reasons for unbelief. Of course, these topics have been discussed at great length and in great depth.

Here are some strongly recommended books for those who are interested in exploring the depths:

J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (1982).

Nicholas Everitt, The Nonexistence of God (2004).

Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990).

Michael Martin, The Case Against Christianity (1991).

Richard Schoenig, Where Christianity Errs (2024).

John Beversluis, C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, Revised and Updated (2007).

Keith Parsons: “No Creator Need Apply: A Reply to to Roy Abraham Verghese,” The Secular Web: https://infidels.org/library/modern/keith-parsons-varghese/

Keith Parsons: “Position Eliminated: Why Paul Herrick’s Critique Fails,” The Secular Web: https://infidels.org/library/modern/position-eliminated/

Keith Parsons is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, emeritus at the University of Houston at Clear Lake and the former editor of the philosophy journal Philo. He has debated William Lane Craig on the topics “Is Christianity True?” and “Does God Exist?”. Dr. Parsons holds a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Queens University.

William Lane Craig vs Keith Parsons | “Why I Am/Am Not A Christian” | Prestonwood Baptist Church

The Case Against Christianity (Keith Parsons)

Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell (1927)

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