CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - How do we think?  How we know ourselves?  In short, where does human consciousness come from?  How do I explain "my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of 'I' and 'me' above and in all things"?  Where does that something that "is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man," as Gerard Manley Hopkins unforgettably put it, come from?

Can matter alone explain human consciousness?  Or is matter alone unable to explain consciousness, requiring that we look outside of matter to a transcendent Cause, that is, God, to explain it?

Is consciousness, in the words of Emily Dickinson's poem "This Consciousness that is Aware," self-contained, adequate unto itself, explained by matter alone?

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.

Is Mind equivalent to Brain?  Are our thoughts--even those of God--transcendental seeming, but actually nothing but epiphenomena stemming from matter alone?  Is Dickinson correct when she wrote in her poem "The Brain-is wider than the Sky"?

The Brain is just the weight of God--
For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound--

Or, rather, is self-consciousness and mind something more along the lines of that which Gerard Manley Hopkins says it is, in his poem "As Kinfishers Catch Fire," something that relates to "God's eye"?

Selves-goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.   

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--

Despite the many efforts of empirical scientists wed, in a sort of unholy marriage, to a physicalist or materialist view of the world to try to explain it, human consciousness has refused to be put in a materialistic box.  

Human consciousness remains intransigent, despite all efforts of the empiricist's greedy grasps to grab it and reduce it to a slave of his one-dimensional science.  It remains a wild and untameable "mystery," to the chagrin of materialists, "and one to which materialism signally fails to provide an answer" as Geoffrey Madell put it in his book Mind and Materialism.

While scientists can explain the human brain, they have had fits explaining the human mind.  In the words of J. P. Moreland, materialistic theories of mind "have multiplied like rabbits," to the point where we may be reaching a "Kuhnian paradigm crisis," which could spell a sort of revolution in thought. 

In his book, The Existence of God, Father John J. Pasquini sets forth a short list of these prolific (if sterile) efforts at explaining consciousness: "patterns of electromagnetic activation, brain wave sequences, brain wave collapses, synaptic tunnels, synaptic passages, neural networks, neural excitations, neurotransmittters, quantum waves, quantum discontinuities, and quantum cytoskeletal states, . . . the interaction of bosons and fermions, biological oscillators, and plasma charged particles . . . . trajectory or particles, 'subtle energies,' the excitation of condensates, and the working in unison of molecules, [and] [a]ll forms of electro-chemical processes . . . ."

The sheer number of materialist theories bespeak of failure.  The Grand Narrative of Evolution is faltering, stuttering, even babbling before the mystery of human consciousness, which is nothing but a witness, a whisper, nay, even the image of God.  In the words of Scripture, we might say that that Darwin's more zealous disciples are stumbling upon the truth that the name of the naturalistic explanation of consciousness is "Legion, for we are many."  (Mark 5:9) 

The fact is that you can pile matter, upon matter, upon matter, and time, upon time, upon time, and you still do not get mind, you still do not get consciousness.  Mind, consciousness, the human soul, spirit do not emerge--cannot emerge--from matter.  Even the atheist philosopher Colin McGinn recognizes the problem when he wrote in his book The Mysterious Flame: "How can mere matter originate consciousness?  How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness?  Consciousness seems like a radical novelty in the universe."

If--per impossibile--consciousness could be explained by empirical science, then the "I" of consciousness disappears because it has lost all first person significance.  If a scientist can perfectly describe my consciousness without me, then it follows ...