DID CONSCIOUSNESS INVENT GOD?

By Aamir Butt

Blog 11/12 of #QuantumSurvivalTheory series

This post might make some people uncomfortable. I want to be clear: I’m not attacking anyone’s faith. I’m tracing an intellectual genealogy. Where did the concept of the divine come from?

QST suggests: it came from consciousness.

The Universal Experience

Forget philosophy. Forget theology. Think about what it’s like to be an early human — or any human, in any era.

You have a body. It’s obviously physical. It bleeds, hungers, decays. You can see it, touch it, understand it.

And you have an inner life. Thoughts, feelings, the sense of “I,” the experience of beauty, moral intuitions. This inner life feels categorically different from the body. You don’t need a philosophy degree to notice the duality. Every human being, in every culture, in every era, has experienced it directly.

The reasoning — implicit across virtually every religious tradition — is straightforward: my body is physical and comprehensible. My awareness is not explicable in physical terms. Therefore it must come from somewhere beyond the physical. Therefore there must be a non-physical realm. Therefore there must be a being or principle governing that realm.

💬 God didn’t explain consciousness. Consciousness implied God. The soul was humanity’s first theory of mind — and the hard problem was its evidence. #QuantumSurvivalTheory

Hard Problems as Theological Generators

It goes deeper than the general concept. Specific hard problems map onto specific theological ideas with unsettling precision:

• The Hard Problem → the Soul. The seemingly non-physical nature of experience generates the concept of a non-physical essence.

• The Binding Problem → the Soul’s Indivisibility. Descartes explicitly argued that unlike the divisible body, the mind is indivisible — a theological claim dressed as philosophy.

• The Problem of Other Minds → Divine Omniscience. If only God can truly know another’s mind, omniscience becomes a defining divine attribute.

• The Boundary Problem → Ensoulment. When does consciousness begin? Religious traditions answer: at conception, at quickening, at first breath — all attempts to locate the insertion point of the soul.

• Causal Efficacy → Free Will. If consciousness causes nothing, there’s no moral responsibility. The causal power of the soul is required for divine judgment.

• The Temporal Problem → Eternal Soul. The soul persists through time, experiencing temporal existence while being fundamentally outside it.

Every hard problem has a theological “solution” that was proposed thousands of years before the philosophical problem was formally named.

The Historical Trajectory

Pre-philosophical cultures experienced consciousness as evidence for the spirit world. Animism is essentially panpsychism expressed in mythological language. Axial Age religions formalised the dualistic frameworks: the Hindu atman, Plato’s immortal soul, the Abrahamic divinely-breathed spirit.

The Enlightenment attempted naturalisation but ran aground on the hard problem. Descartes ended a dualist because he couldn’t see how matter could produce thought. His solution — the pineal gland as the interface between body and soul — was explicitly theological. Modern neuroscience attempts to complete the Enlightenment project but still hasn’t closed the gap.

Until, perhaps, now.

What This Means

If QST is correct, the soul was never wrong. It was a remarkably accurate intuition that something beyond electrochemistry was at work. It just identified the wrong “beyond.” Not the supernatural. The quantum.

This doesn’t disprove God. You can’t disprove a metaphysical claim with physics. But it removes the strongest intellectual foundation for theism: the apparent impossibility of explaining consciousness naturalistically. The last gap where God was needed as an explanation would be closed.

Whether that changes anyone’s belief is a deeply personal question. But the intellectual landscape changes permanently.