A
just people who have concluded that Gods, such as Zeus, are not real.
If one concludes Zeus IS real, then, one is not an atheist.
What would a believer in Zeus say, to explain the existence of “thought and conscience”?
Odin?
Pan?
Baal?
Why ask Atheists?
:)
If you ask neuroscientists, etc, the explanation is that thought and conscience are emergent properties of having a nervous system.
“Back in the day those two were always associated with spirit.”
Not always, but, sometimes, because “back in the day” most people knew almost nothing about neurobiology etc.
They thought everything had a spirit, and was a God, even trees and mountains etc.
“If there is no God than there is no spirit. “
If you define them that way, sure.
But, neither show actual evidence of existence, and, you're strawman of spirit for thought and conscience is duly noted.
“What causes the existence of thought in that case?”
The evidence is that thought is an emergent property of having a nervous system.
A
You’re basically circling a few different questions that often get mixed together: (1) what explains thought and conscience, (2) whether “spirit” is a necessary concept, and (3) what different belief systems would say about minds in the first place.
On the atheist side, the standard naturalistic account is exactly what you described: thought and conscience are treated as emergent properties of nervous systems. That means they aren’t “extra substances” added on top of biology, but patterns produced by complex information processing in brains. Neuroscience links specific mental functions—decision-making, moral judgment, self-reflection—to brain networks, learning, and evolutionarily shaped social cognition.
That still leaves an open philosophical layer sometimes called the “hard problem of consciousness” (why subjective experience exists at all), but even there, most working scientific explanations stay within physical systems rather than invoking non-physical entities.
On the mythological/polytheistic side—Zeus, Odin, Pan, Baal, etc. Zeus Odin Pan Baal—different traditions would historically explain mind and conscience very differently:
- In many ancient frameworks, thought is not purely “mechanical.” It is often tied to soul (psyche), spirit, breath, or divine influence.
- A believer in Zeus or Odin might say consciousness comes from a soul given by the gods, or from divine order embedded in the cosmos.
- Some traditions would attribute moral awareness to divine law or cosmic justice rather than brain-based processes.
But it’s important not to overstate the “everything was spirits” idea. Ancient people didn’t all think identically, and even in antiquity there were proto-naturalistic thinkers (for example, some Greek philosophers already tried to explain mind in material terms without gods).
On your point about “why ask atheists?”—it depends on the question being asked. If the question is “what explains thought without gods?”, then atheists (or more precisely, naturalists and neuroscientists) are relevant because they’re explicitly working within non-divine explanatory frameworks. If the question is “what do believers think?”, then you’d go to theological traditions instead.
Finally, the “spirit = thought” equivalence is indeed not something neuroscience assumes. Modern cognitive science doesn’t treat “spirit” as a required explanatory layer; it treats mental states as functions or processes implemented in physical systems. Whether that feels complete is where the philosophical disagreement usually lives—not in whether brains correlate with thought, but in whether that’s all there is to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment