Got Questions? series, article 3
In our “Got Questions?” series so far, we have asked whether God exists and whether science makes God unnecessary. There is another question underneath both of those, and it touches every one of us. We are not merely objects in the universe. We are persons.
So 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 matter and motion?
I want to be careful how I put the challenge, because it is easy to argue against a version of the other side that nobody actually holds.
What the other side is actually claiming
No serious scientist believes that time by itself does the work. Nobody thinks you can leave a pile of chemicals alone and come back to a poet. The claim is more careful than that, and it deserves to be stated in its strongest form: unguided physical and chemical processes, given energy, environmental cycling, and vast stretches of time, produced increasing complexity, and that complexity eventually included life, and then minds, and then selves.
That is a serious proposal. It is not obviously absurd, and pretending otherwise will not persuade anyone worth persuading.
But stating it carefully does not dissolve the question. It sharpens it. Grant the processes. Grant the time. You still have to ask whether those processes adequately account for what we actually find: coordinated information, a code and something that reads the code, and, most stubbornly, a first-person point of view. A self that reasons about truth, that loves, that chooses, that feels the weight of “I ought” and “I ought not.”
The question is not whether the naturalist can tell a story. The question is which account better explains the world we actually inhabit.
Life is more than having the right parts
Consider one recent piece of evidence, and consider it honestly.
In 2016, a team led by Clyde Hutchison at the J. Craig Venter Institute reported a synthetic bacterium with a deliberately minimized genome, JCVI-syn3.0. They did not create life from raw chemicals. They started with an existing synthetic derivative of Mycoplasma mycoides and used repeated cycles of design, deletion, and testing to strip out genes that could be removed. The result retained 473 genes under laboratory conditions, and at the time of the report, 149 of those genes had no assigned biological function. [1]
Two honest qualifications. First, that organism was minimal relative to one bacterium in one laboratory environment, not the simplest possible living thing. Second, later work has narrowed the mystery, mostly by computational prediction rather than experiment. [2]
So what does the experiment show? It does not prove design, and I will not claim that it does. What it shows is how much coordinated complexity remains even in a system engineered downward as far as its designers could push it, and how much intelligence was required to get that result. Nobody left chemicals in a dish and came back to syn3.0. Brilliant people arranged what they already understood.
And that points to something the origin-of-life problem keeps running into. Life is not merely a matter of having the right parts. Having amino acids is like having an alphabet. Having them in the right sequence is like having words. But a living cell also needs grammar (the genetic code), a translator (ribosomes), an energy source (ATP), error correction (DNA repair), packaging (membranes), and reproduction (cell division). These systems do not operate in isolation. They reference each other.
No one has to show all of that arriving at once. The precursors may have been simpler, and replication, catalysis, and primitive translation may have developed together rather than in sequence. Serious researchers are working on exactly this. A 2022 Nature paper showed peptides growing directly on RNA, which suggests how a world of nucleic acids and proteins might have started. [3]
But notice how those same authors describe the underlying question. How and when RNA learned to instruct peptide synthesis is, in their words, “one of the grand unsolved challenges in prebiotic evolutionary research.” That is not my verdict on their field. It is theirs. They may yet crack it. They have not cracked it.
Parts remain parts.
Chemistry and the problem of the inside
That brings us to the harder problem, and this is where the real weight of the question lies.
Suppose we one day trace the whole chain from simple chemistry to complex nervous systems. Even then, the deepest mystery is untouched: why do we experience anything at all?
Bite into a pizza. You do not merely process information about temperature and taste. You experience it. There is someone on the inside who feels that warmth, tastes that flavor, enjoys that moment. A computer can analyze the ingredients perfectly and experience nothing. It is empty inside. So why are we not like that? Why is there a “you” on the inside experiencing your life, instead of a body going through the motions with nobody home?
Philosophers call this the hard problem of consciousness. [4] It is not the question of how the brain processes information. It is the question of why the processing is accompanied by any inner experience at all.
Some suggest consciousness simply emerges once a system gets complex enough. But emergence names the mystery rather than solving it. We can explain wetness in terms of how water molecules behave together, because wetness just is a way of describing that behavior. Consciousness will not reduce so easily. Someone could study your brain all day and see exactly which neurons fire when you taste chocolate, and still not know what it is like for you to taste chocolate. The description from outside does not deliver the view from inside.
Chemistry can produce reactions. Reactions do not aim at truth. Reactions do not weigh evidence. Reactions do not love their children. An impersonal cause is a strange candidate for the origin of personal realities.
Can naturalism account for reason?
Here we should be careful again, because this is where Christians often overreach.
If someone says that all truth and meaning are illusions, that claim destroys itself. He is asking you to believe him because what he says is true. If truth is an illusion, there is nothing there to believe.
But most naturalists do not say that. They believe meaning is real, that conscience is real, that our minds can discover truth, and that these are genuine higher-level realities arising from physical processes. Some are atheists and moral realists both. It would be a cheap victory to pretend that every materialist openly regards love as a chemical trick, and it would not be true.
The real question is deeper and harder to wave away. Can a universe of exclusively non-rational causes account for rational inference?
C. S. Lewis pressed this in Miracles. His point was not primarily about survival. It was about the difference between a cause and a ground. A belief may be produced by prior physical events in your skull. But rational thought requires more than that. It requires that a conclusion be held because it follows from reasons, that the logical relation itself does the work. If every thought is only the latest link in a chain of physical causes, it is difficult to see how any thought is ever an insight rather than an occurrence. [5]
The naturalist will answer that rational relations can be realized in physical processes. Of course they can. Your brain is certainly doing something while you follow an argument. But to say the inference is realized in the neurons restates the connection rather than explaining it. The question is why one thought ought to follow another. “Ought” is not a word chemistry knows.
Alvin Plantinga developed a related argument decades later, and the two are often blended together, so it is worth keeping them straight. Plantinga’s version concerns reliability: if our faculties were shaped only to promote survival, we have little reason to think they were shaped to track truth, since a useful false belief serves survival just as well. [6]
A naturalist has a fair answer to Plantinga: accurate beliefs usually do aid survival. Seeing the cliff as a cliff beats seeing it as a meadow. That reply has force, and I think it is largely right as far as it goes.
But it leaves Lewis’s question standing. Reasoning assumes our minds can track truth, and not merely survive. That expectation makes sense if we are made in the image of a rational God. It is harder to account for if we are cosmic accidents.
Christianity’s answer: the personal God
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 to 27). Your capacity to think, choose, love, and know right from wrong is not the residue of random chance.
Which raises something worth pausing over. When you flip a fair coin, it has a 50% chance of landing heads. But chance does not make it land one way or the other. Chance is a word we use to describe potential outcomes, a mathematical description rather than a causal agent. R. C. Sproul argued this at length: chance has no creative power. It cannot build anything. It cannot design anything. [7]
The naturalist will say he never claimed chance builds anything. He appeals to lawful processes in which some outcomes are probabilistic. Fair enough. But a law is not a mind either. Neither probability nor regularity intends anything. And persons are a strange thing to find at the end of a process where nothing ever intended anything at all.
Christianity has an explanation. You are not a mistake. You are made for relationship with your Creator.
The Bible goes further. All things were made through the eternal Word, and in Christ “all things hold together” (John 1:1 to 3; Colossians 1:16 to 17). The foundation of reality is not less than mind. It is the living God who speaks, commands, loves, and saves.
The Person who entered our history
Christianity’s claim is that this personal God did not remain distant.
Here we have to be precise, because this article is about persons, and the wording matters. The eternal Son did not become a person at Bethlehem. He eternally is a divine Person. In the incarnation, the Person of the Son took to Himself a true human nature. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Without ceasing to be God, He took our humanity and entered our history as “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Truly God and truly man.
And He did not come merely to explain what a person is. He came to save guilty persons.
That word “guilty” is the one we have been circling. Conscience is not a rumor. It is a witness. We have not merely thought about the personal God, we have offended Him. And Christ lived the righteous life we have not lived, bore the judgment our sins deserved at the cross, and rose from the dead, so that everyone who turns from sin and trusts in Him is reconciled to his Creator and counted righteous in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21). God “commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30).
That is the gospel. Not a technique for feeling personal about the universe. A crucified and risen Savior who deals with real guilt.
An invitation to follow the evidence
Antony Flew was a prominent twentieth-century atheist philosopher who argued against God’s existence for decades. Late in life, he abandoned atheism. He pointed to the laws of nature, the origin and organization of life, and the existence of the universe itself. He wrote, “I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence.” [8]
Flew did not profess Christian faith. But his change of mind shows that a lifelong atheist could conclude that mind, rationality, and life require more than an impersonal universe can supply. The question is whether the evidence will carry you further than it carried him, 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 repent and believe. And if you would like to talk it through, come and speak with us.
Footnotes
[1] Clyde A. Hutchison III et al., “Design and Synthesis of a Minimal Bacterial Genome,” Science 351, no. 6280 (March 25, 2016), doi:10.1126/science.aad6253. JCVI-syn3.0 was reported with 531 kilobase pairs and 473 genes, including 149 genes of unknown biological function.
[2] Magdalena Antczak, Martin Michaelis, and Mark N. Wass, “Environmental Conditions Shape the Nature of a Minimal Bacterial Genome,” Nature Communications 10 (2019): 3100, doi:10.1038/s41467-019-10837-2. Combining computational methods, the study assigned functions to 66 of the 149 proteins with confidence and some level of annotation to 133, leaving 16 entirely unannotated. The same paper notes that an earlier engineering-based approach by Danchin and Fang provided annotations for 71 of the 149. These are in silico predictions rather than experimentally confirmed functions.
[3] Felix Müller, Luis Escobar, Felix Xu, Ewa Węgrzyn, Milda Nainytė, Tynchtyk Amatov, Chun-Yin Chan, Alexander Pichler, and Thomas Carell, “A Prebiotically Plausible Scenario of an RNA–Peptide World,” Nature 605, no. 7909 (May 12, 2022): 279 to 284, doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04676-3. The quoted phrase is the authors’ own description of the problem.
[4] David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200 to 219.
[5] C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947; revised 1960), chapter 3, “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.”
[6] Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 10, “The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.” Plantinga first published the argument as “An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism,” Logos 12 (1991): 27 to 49.
[7] R. C. Sproul, Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology (Baker Books, 1994).
[8] Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (HarperOne, 2007), 88.