thesis

THE ARGUMENT FOR SCIENTIFIC INEXPLICABILITY
The main thrust of Swinburne’s argument from consciousness in The Existence of God
(1979, 160–75) is that it is unlikely that science will ever be able to explain the existence and
contents of consciousness. This is broadly similar to the argument pursued by Adams in his
essay ‘Flavours, Colours and God’. But, considered in isolation, the argument will turn out
to be rather indirect, so I will supplement it with Swinburne’s argument for substance dual-
ism in The Evolution of the Soul. How substance dualism provides support for theism will be
discussed later.
We pick up Swinburne’s argument in The Existence of God from where we left Chalmers,
having established that “some kind of dualism of entities or properties or states is inevita-
ble” (1979, 166). Swinburne goes on to outline three steps which science will have to take in
order to establish a naturalistic explanation of consciousness – for the first two, he cites diffi-
culties, but he believes that the most significant problems lie in the third.
Establish Correlations
The first stage is to (167)
establish for all mental events and states a one-one or perhaps one-many correlation between
the occurrence of mental events of specifiable kinds, and the simultaneous occurrence of brain-
events of specifiable kinds…
For example, we might imagine amassing enough evidence to suggest that whenever a
certain subset of neurons in a brain fires in a certain pattern, a conscious experience of feel-
ing a headache is undergone. We could further imagine discovering such correlations for
every type of experience subjects undergo, enabling us to predict what it is like to be them
given the relevant neurological data. We might even be able to induce experiences by manu-
ally stimulating these sets of neurons.
Swinburne argues that any such discoveries will be “dubious” since “the lack of public
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