The Necessity of God, Part III

Do you exist? How do you know? Is it because you experience tactile sensations? Because you can move? Because you can process information inside your head? I submit that you would still be certain of your own existence if you were completely paralyzed, in a sensory deprivation tank, or even if you weren’t thinking in the traditional sense of the word. You know that you exist because you have self awareness.

Computers are interesting in this regard. A computer can be programmed to simulate self awareness. All you need do is tell the machine that it exists, and it will answer in the affirmative every time. But how will it respond if we tell it that it doesn’t exist?

Suppose we build a computer with a body of flesh and bone and program it to perfectly simulate the behavior of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Would the computer then have self awareness? Despite what science fiction would have you believe, the answer is still “No.” No matter how complex its nervous system may be, it has no actual self to become aware of. In its essence, the machine is still a machine: a swirl of electrical/chemical/mechanical activity. Any statement the machine makes about itself will always be determined by the arrangement of those electrical/chemical/mechanical parts. It can report on the condition of its internals, but it can never know that it knows something. We can change its report simply by changing the condition of its parts. In other words, it can store and report data, but it can never know anything. This is because its every response will always be caused by its own arrangement and any stimulus it receives. As C.S. Lewis put it, any statement from such a machine will contain no more knowledge than the statement “I itch.”

But you and I are not like a machine. You would still know you that exist, even if told otherwise by people you respect. There is a “ghost in the machines” of you and me. This is why a belief in evolution can never replace the necessity of God: because self awareness can never spring up in an entirely caused universe, no matter how complex the organism or how long the time. This is because self-awareness is at least partly an uncaused event, the first uncaused event that humans perform. It is the first act of a new mind: conscious self awareness, the realization of the certainty that I am.

Descartes had it wrong. It is not “I think, therefore I am,” for an argument can be made that computers think. It is rather, “I know that I am, therefore I am.” In other words, I have self awareness. There is a “me” inside here; I have a mind to be aware of; I exist. This is not something we can be told, for what if we were told the opposite? We cannot learn it through our senses, for our senses could lie. This knowledge of oneself cannot be achieved by any physical cause or it is not really known, but only a statement of the condition of the electrons in one’s cortex.

I am.

Interesting that God, in the Old Testament when Moses asked His name, replied, “I am that I am.” God, representing Himself in his simplest form, meets completely the first requirement of all conscious beings.