In my last entry in this series, I went over how the combined evidence from various design arguments supports theism over atheistic worldviews. This time, I will be going over how morality, consciousness, and free will are better explained by Christian Theism than by atheistic and naturalistic alternatives.
If you examine how the atheist naturalist responds to morality, consciousness, and free will, they essentially dismiss them all as illusions because their worldviews make it impossible for such things as a transcendent moral law, immaterial mind, or free will to exist. However, when one dismisses something very obvious as an illusion because their worldview won’t allow it, it is an implicit admission that the experience we see in the world is not predicted on their worldview. Despite how obvious something seems, they must reject it because their presuppositions won’t allow for things to be as they appear.
It may be justified to override the intuition of one’s experience if one has good evidence that our experience is mistaken. However, in this article, I plan to show that the weight of the arguments and evidence do not support atheistic interpretations. The atheist typically is forced to come up with excuses for why the world doesn’t appear how their worldview predicts, but even if they try to accommodate the data, rather than dismissing it, they are still unable to come up with feasible explanations for morality, consciousness and free will.
Moral Values and Duties
On the 21st of November, 1945, within the solemn halls of Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, Justice Robert H. Jackson, serving as the Chief Counsel for the United States, delivered a defining opening address to the International Military Tribunal. In this address, he laid out the case for prosecuting Nazis on the basis that they violated natural rights and had complete disregard for natural law.
Was Robert Jackson correct? Is there a law above the law that we can appeal to condemn people outside our culture and nation? Or is morality just relative to culture or even an individual’s personal preferences? Many of the lawyers for the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials reportedly tried to appeal to moral relativism as a defense. They reportedly argued that because certain crimes against humanity were acceptable in their culture, therefore it wasn’t wrong. If there is no objective morality, then their defense would be completely correct. In our culture, it’s wrong to murder innocent civilians, but in theirs, it isn’t, and neither view is more or less correct than the other. It’s all relative, and it’s all just opinion.
According to most atheist naturalists, morality is nothing more than an illusion. As philosopher of science Michael Ruse explains, “The position of the modern evolutionist… is that humans have an awareness of morality… because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth… Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves… Nevertheless… such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction… and any deeper meaning is illusory.”
Many reading this will find something obviously troubling about the idea that the morality of rape, murder, and genocide are just illusions and that right and wrong are just opinion. But can we really examine the instances of evil in this world and still conclude that there’s no truth to whether it was right or wrong? Consider the following example used by Philosopher William Lane Craig:
A BBC documentary titled “The Gathering” recounted the harrowing experiences of Holocaust survivors. One recounted horrifying experiments that were conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele. The doctor wanted to learn how long an infant could survive without nourishment. Desperately, this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it pieces of bread soaked in coffee, but to no avail. Each day the baby lost weight, a fact that was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. A nurse then came secretly to this woman and told her, “I have arranged a way for you to get out of here, but you cannot take your baby with you. I have brought a morphine injection that you can give to your child to end its life.” When the woman protested, the nurse was insistent: “Look, your baby is going to die anyway. At least save yourself.” And so, this mother took the life of her own baby. Dr. Mengele was furious when he learned of it because he had lost his experimental specimen, and he searched among the dead to find the baby’s discarded corpse so that he could have one last weighing.
When one comes across stories like this, can we really say that Dr. Mengele did nothing wrong? That what he did just upsets our personal sensibilities or cultural norms and that from an objective view, what he did was neither moral nor immoral?
Consider also moral progress throughout history. Was stopping the Nazis and abolishing slavery objectively good developments in the history of the world? Surely, we have progressed, but the only way we can progress is if there is an objective moral standard we are progressing towards. Someone disagreeing with this would have to say that it really wasn’t progress abolishing slavery or ending segregation, which would seem a very difficult bullet to bite.
Arguments and considerations like these are why the majority (56.4%) of philosophers subscribe to moral realism, according to a PhilPapers survey. I could go into further arguments and explore the idea of morality being a properly basic belief, but that will have to wait for an in-depth post on the moral argument.
So, if objective morality exists, then what is the best explanation for where it comes from? On the atheist naturalist view, morals seem inexplicable. Why would an undesigned random universe have an underlying moral law? It seems almost as if the universe anticipated us. Many atheists have tried to explain morals without God, but any explanation ends up with prescriptions without a prescriber and/or concepts like Justice floating out in the ether of abstract objects. Why are these problems? A blind universe is incapable of prescribing that you do anything because it’s inanimate, and only agents can prescribe things. To say that prescriptions just so happen to exist and that we just so happened to evolve into just the kind of beings these prescriptions apply to seems to be an indefensible position that strains credulity. Furthermore, if values like Justice exist as an abstract object independent of a God, then that would mean there is an abstract object called “justice” that itself is not just, as the object has never done anything just and which only moral agents can do. Again, we see that the idea that Justice “just existing” seems untenable.
Why think God is responsible? Many have stated it as simply as, a transcendent moral law requires a transcendent moral lawgiver. God is an agent who can issue prescriptions, who himself would be just since he is a maximally great being. Many a college philosophy freshman will now respond with the famous Euthyphro dilemma: is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it’s good? However, this is a false dilemma, as the answer I would give is that God commands it because HE is good. On this view, God just is the ultimate paradigm of morality and issues moral obligations consistent with his nature. Thus, on theism, we have the only plausible explanation for the existence of objective moral values and duties. Atheists either are left with no viable option for accounting for morality, or they have to dismiss it as illusory, which shows that morality fits far better into a Christian theistic worldview than an atheistic one.
Consciousness, the Soul, and Free Will
Consciousness and free will are phenomena that intuitively appear self-evident, yet they pose significant challenges for an atheistic naturalist worldview. The emergence of an immaterial mind from inanimate matter is a perplexing concept, and free will seems at odds with a deterministic universe. In contrast, theism offers a coherent explanation: an immaterial soul that embodies the mind and facilitates free will, a gift from a creator to sentient beings.
Naturalists typically fall into 2 camps, reductive and non-reductive physicalism. Reductionist physicalism asserts that all mental states and properties are ultimately identical to physical states and properties, explaining consciousness purely in terms of neural activities and physical processes. In contrast, non-reductionist physicalism acknowledges the physical basis of mental states but denies complete reducibility. It posits that mental states possess emergent properties beyond the physical, allowing for causal powers and complexity not fully captured by reductionist approaches .
The first major issue with the reductive accounts often proposed by atheists is their failure to adequately explain our understanding of the mind. Describing the mind in purely physical terms is problematic. Philosopher William Lane Craig articulates this problem:
“Reductive physicalism falls short in accounting for our mental lives. The brain, as a physical entity, possesses only physical properties—volume, mass, density, location, shape. Yet, it lacks mental properties. The brain is not jubilant or sorrowful; it does not experience pain, even though it’s involved in the neural processes that give rise to such sensations. Fear, for instance, cannot be reduced to a mere physical state, even if correlated with one. Thus, reductive physicalism is untenable, failing to align with our mental experiences.”
Some atheists argue that consciousness and free will are illusory, believing that science will eventually unravel a deterministic process for decision-making and mental activity. However, this stance is questionable.
Craig counters, “If reductive physicalists claim such experiences are illusory, they encounter a self-defeating position. An illusion is a mental state. But according to their view, mental states don’t exist. Hence, there can be no illusion of consciousness.” This presents a contradiction for the atheist reductionist: if the illusion exists, then mental states must exist, but if they do, how can they be illusory?
Second, the “naturalism of the gaps” argument—asserting that an unknown explanation will eventually align with naturalism—is an unjustifiable assumption by the atheist naturalist. Lest anyone accuse me of a God of the gaps argument, I am arguing not from what we don’t know, I am arguing from what we do know, which will only become even more clear as one examines the remaining points in this article. My argument isn’t “we don’t know therefore it’s God” my argument is that from what we do know about consciousness and free will it fits better with Christian theism tham it does the atheistic alternatives.
Third, our experiences and current evidence do not support the notion that free will and consciousness are illusions. As you read this article, it seems evident that you can choose to continue or stop reading at any moment. Your mental states and reactions to this text are real. This reality is so apparent that it’s hard to imagine any evidence that could rationalize the opposite belief.
Consider being wrongfully accused of a crime you didn’t commit. If you’re sober, rational, and without mental health issues, how much evidence would it take to convince you of your guilt? Likely, no amount of evidence could persuade you of a crime you know you didn’t commit. Similarly, the evidence for reductionist accounts of free will and consciousness is far from overwhelming.
Moreover, a problem for naturalists, particularly concerning free will, is that the evidence suggests that decisions are self-generated, a concept difficult to reconcile with naturalism whether they’re reductionist or non-reductionist. Neuroscientist Wilder Penfield’s research provides compelling evidence. He found that when stimulating a patient’s motor cortex, the patient recognized the actions weren’t self-initiated. Penfield notes:
“When I caused a conscious patient to move his hand with an electrode on the motor cortex, the patient would say, ‘I didn’t do that. You did.’ When I made him vocalize, he said, ‘I didn’t make that sound. You pulled it out of me.’”
These observations imply that consciousness is not solely reliant on brain activity but is an independent entity capable of observation and experience, separate from the physical brain. Penfield also observed:
“There is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to… decide.”
Free will, as an undetermined event rooted in an immaterial mind, aligns more plausibly with a theistic framework. According to Penfield, choices are not dictated by brain activity, suggesting the existence of a non-physical agent that can influence the material world. Theism ascribes this agency to the soul, consistent with the notion of a divine creator granting humans free will.
Lastly, the non-reductionist essentially has to deny the existence of self identity over time. Since one’s consciousness just emerges from the brain like a flame emerges from a candle. However, if you are the same person who started reading this article then it follows that non-reductive physicalism is false.
Theism provides a more satisfactory explanation for consciousness, the soul, and free will than atheistic alternatives. The personal nature of these experiences and the capacity for undetermined choices are congruent with a worldview that acknowledges a personal God, the ultimate source of consciousness and free will. This argument, founded on philosophical reasoning and empirical evidence, offers a much better explanation of human experience than an atheistic naturalist view, which requires the denial of very obvious facets of our experience.
Conclusion
In the areas of morality, consciousness and free will we see that the atheists either can give no plausible account for these phenomena or they are forced dismiss them as illusions. Their attempted explanations strain credulity and fly directly in the face of some of the most obvious truths we know from our daily experiences. Rather than following what evidence and experience tells us, the atheists naturalists are forced by their ideological pressupositions to adopt self-contradictory and unsupported views.
From a Christian theistic point of view we have a much more apt explanation for these phenomena. We have a transcendent moral law giver to act as the paradigm of moral goodness and issues transcendent laws. Christians also have an explanation for free will and consciousness as we have a God who can endow physicsal bodies with souls to ground consciousness and free will. The atheist naturalist puts themselves at a disadvantage because they must limit their explanation to only natural causes due to their philosophical pressupositions. In contrast, the theist can be open to both natural and supernatural explanations and just follow the evidence where it leads.
An atheist might admit that Christians have a better explanation but may say that the amount of evil and suffering in the world make more sense on am atheistic view. If God exists where is he? Why doesn’t he show himself and stop horrendous evil acts? In part 3 I will cover the counter examples posed by divine hiddenness and the problem of evil.
Sources:
The Mystery of the Mind, Wilder Penfield, p 76-80
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/question-answer/P40/why-do-determinists-say-the-self-is-an-illusion/
Expositing Reality 
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