In our “Got Questions?” series so far, we have asked whether God exists and whether science makes God unnecessary. But there is another question underneath both of those, one that touches every one of us. That is because we are not merely objects in the universe; we are persons.
Here is the question: How do you get persons from an impersonal universe? How do you get mind, meaning, love, guilt, laughter, reason, and conscience from nothing but matter and motion?
Many people assume the answer is simple: given enough time, matter can eventually become life, and life can eventually become intelligence, and intelligence can eventually become personality. But that assumption needs to be tested, not merely repeated.
Some will say evolution bridges the gap. But even if you grant change over time, the deeper question remains: how do mindless, unguided processes produce minds, and not only minds, but persons? How do you get a real “I,” a self that reasons about truth, loves, chooses, and feels the weight of “I ought” and “I ought not,” out of nothing but matter in motion?
Some will say consciousness gradually evolved from simpler nervous systems, from basic reactions, to feeling sensations, to awareness, to full consciousness. But this still doesn’t solve the real problem. Even if you can trace how brains got more complex over time, you still haven’t explained the most basic mystery: why do we experience anything at all?
Think about it this way: when you bite into a pizza, you don’t just process information about temperature and taste. You experience it. There’s someone on the inside (you) who feels that warmth, tastes that flavor, enjoys that moment. Why? A computer can analyze pizza ingredients perfectly, but it doesn’t experience anything. It’s empty inside. So why aren’t we like that? Why is there a ‘you’ on the inside experiencing your life, instead of just a body going through the motions with nobody home?
Time is not a cause
Time can measure duration, but it cannot explain how meaning arises in the first place. It is a clock, not a creator. If you leave parts alone long enough, you do not get a message, a code, and an interpreter, because interpretation belongs to minds, not molecules.
Think about it in ordinary terms. Take a pile of dirt, or a mound of chemicals, or a mix of raw materials. Leave it alone for ten minutes, you still have a pile. Leave it alone for a year, you still have a pile. Leave it alone for a million years, you still have a pile. Without guidance, without a plan, without an organizing mind, time does not turn “stuff” into “self.”
Even when scientists do remarkable work in the lab, what we see is not accidental life emerging from nothing, but brilliant minds arranging and engineering what they already understand. One famous example is the lab-created ‘minimal cell.’ Scientists stripped away every gene they thought was unnecessary, trying to create the simplest possible living cell. The result? It still requires 473 genes to function. And here’s the striking part: 149 of those genes have functions scientists cannot yet explain. In other words, even the most stripped-down living system we can build is still astonishingly complex, and it does not appear by leaving chemicals alone. It bears all the hallmarks of design. [1]
And this gets to the heart of the challenge for a purely materialistic framework. Life is not merely having the right “parts.” Life requires coordination, instructions, self-copying, and energy, all working together at the same time. Think of it like this: having amino acids is like having an alphabet. Having the right amino acids in sequence is like having words. But life also needs grammar (the genetic code), a translator (ribosomes), an energy source (ATP), error correction (DNA repair), packaging (cell membranes), and reproduction (cell division). All of these systems reference and depend on each other. Remove any one, and the whole thing collapses. This is what makes purely materialistic origin-of-life scenarios so difficult. You need multiple integrated systems working simultaneously. Parts remain parts. Not life.
Chemistry can’t explain consciousness
So the issue is not a small gap that can be casually filled with “more time.” The issue is a category difference. Chemistry can produce reactions. But reactions do not aim at truth. Reactions do not weigh evidence. Reactions do not love their children. Reactions do not feel the moral weight of “I should” or “I should not.” An impersonal cause does not naturally give rise to personal realities.
Some suggest consciousness simply “emerges” from sufficient complexity. But emergence is a description, not an explanation. It names the mystery without solving it. Wetness emerges from water molecules because wetness is just a way of describing how those molecules behave together. But consciousness is not just behavior. It is the inner experience of “I am,” the felt quality of being someone. No amount of describing neurons firing explains why there is someone home to experience it.
Here’s another way to see the difference: you can fully describe wetness by describing how water molecules behave. But you cannot fully describe consciousness by describing how neurons fire. Why? Because consciousness has an inside view. There’s what it feels like from your perspective. Someone can study your brain all day long and see exactly which neurons are firing when you taste chocolate. But they still don’t know what it’s like for you to taste chocolate. That inside experience, that ‘you’ experiencing your life, can’t be captured by studying the outside. The subjective experience isn’t the same as the objective description.
The self-refuting position
That is why this question matters so much: if the universe is ultimately impersonal, then personhood is an accident, and meaning is an illusion, and conscience is a chemical trick. But we do not live that way. We live as though truth matters, as though love matters, as though right and wrong are real, and as though persons have value. The worldview has to account for the world we actually inhabit.
There’s another problem: anyone who says “all meaning is illusion” or “conscience is just chemistry” is making a truth claim. They are asking you to believe them because what they say is true. But if truth itself is an illusion, why believe them? The position refutes itself.
C.S. Lewis pressed this problem even further. He pointed out that if all our thoughts are just the result of brain chemistry and survival instincts, not aimed at truth, then why should we trust them when they reason about anything? If naturalism is true, your brain only cares whether you survive and reproduce, not whether your beliefs are actually true. A useful false belief works just as well as a true one, as long as it keeps you alive. So if your brain is just chemistry shaped by survival pressures, why trust it when it reasons about chemistry, survival, or anything else? The naturalist who argues for naturalism is sawing off the branch he’s sitting on. The very act of reasoning assumes our minds can track truth, not just survival. And that makes sense if we’re made in the image of a rational God. It makes no sense if we’re cosmic accidents.
Christianity’s answer: the personal God
Christianity does. Scripture begins, “In the beginning, God.” Not impersonal forces, not blind matter, not fate. A living, personal God. And the Bible says we are persons because we are made in His image (Genesis 1:26–27). This means your capacity to think, choose, love, and recognize right from wrong isn’t the result of random chance. And here’s something important to understand: chance isn’t actually a thing with power to make anything happen. When you flip a coin, it has a 50% chance of landing heads and a 50% chance of landing tails. But ‘chance’ doesn’t make it land one way or the other. Chance is just a word we use to describe potential outcomes. [2] This is the difference between mathematical description and causal power. Chance has no creative power. It can’t build anything. It can’t design anything. Your personhood, your capacity to think and love and choose, requires an explanation with actual creative power behind it. And Christianity says that power is God. You’re not a mistake. You’re made for relationship with your Creator. That explains why the universe is intelligible, why our minds can grasp it, and why personhood is not an intruder in reality but part of its design.
And it goes further. The Bible says all things were made through the eternal Word, and that in Christ “all things hold together” (John 1:1–3; Colossians 1:16–17). In other words, the foundation of reality is not less than mind. It is more than mind. Not less than personality, but the living God who speaks, commands, loves, and saves.
And here’s the stunning claim of Christianity: this personal God didn’t remain distant. He entered history as a person, Jesus Christ, so we could know Him personally. The question isn’t whether personhood is real. You already know it is. The question is whether you’ll acknowledge the Person who made you a person.
An invitation to follow the evidence
Anthony Flew was one of the 20th century’s most influential atheist philosophers. For decades he argued against God’s existence. But late in life, he abandoned atheism. Why? He said the origin of life, the fine-tuning of the universe, and especially the existence of rationality itself pointed to Mind behind it all. He wrote, “I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence.” By all accounts, Flew didn’t become a Christian, but he recognized what the evidence points to. If you’re an honest thinker, you can’t ignore the evidence forever. The question is whether you’ll follow it all the way to Christ.
If you are wrestling with these questions, start here: read the Gospel of John slowly and honestly, with an open Bible and an open mind. Ask God to show you the truth. Since God is personal, your personhood is not an accident, and your conscience is not an illusion. It is a signpost. Christianity is not offering God as one option among many. It is announcing that God has made Himself known in the Person of Jesus Christ, and that He now calls you to respond to Him. And if you would like to talk it through, come speak with us.
Footnotes
[1] “Design and Synthesis of a Minimal Bacterial Genome,” Clyde A. Hutchison III et al., Science, March 25, 2016, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (JCVI-syn3.0 reported with 473 genes; includes 149 genes of unknown function.)
[2] This insight comes from R.C. Sproul, who developed this argument extensively in his book Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology (Baker Books, 1994). Sproul demonstrated that “chance” is a mathematical description, not a causal agent.