Consciousness Relates Us to Infinity in the Image of God

Consciousness is a dynamic, finite state – relating to the infinite insofar as every image is graphically surrounded by the darkness and boundlessness of one’s potential nonexistence. The neurological evidence is overwhelming that an unlimited, immaterial Person, existing outside of space and time, bests explains consciousness or what might be called the “light of self.” This light cannot logically emerge from matter, but is the reality which allows for the creation of matter as an orderly state. Kierkegard was on the right track when he referred to the self as “the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude which relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, a task which can be performed only by means of a relationship to God.”[1]

Quantum fluctuations notwithstanding, only God can create matter from nothing – or as the Bible puts it, he “calls into existence things that do not exist.”[2] If matter, not God, is fundamental, it becomes impossible to explain how the self becomes illuminated to itself as finite or “conscious.” Only if God is light does the design of the brain make sense. This light must be a Person as biblically defined — this being the only way to explain how a universal tendency toward increasing disorder is contained by an image.

We experience consciousness as an anticipatory disparity with infinity, manifesting as a focal image within a surrounding sphere of self – with the focal awareness of an image blunting an otherwise accelerating tendency toward weightless nonexistence. Journey to the Center of the Brain (my longer (778 page book) traces the pathways that the elementary components of an image, “qualia,” travel deep into the brain — revealing that their fusion into a composite image is driven by the energy-releasing “anticipation of infinity” and equivalently a regressive change in the direction of weightlessness.

Everything about the brain fits perfectly with this perspective, with the interaction of brain centers defining the anatomy by which infinity is thwarted. Indeed, the identity between the “anticipation” of infinity, thwarted by an image, and real neurological events is explicable only if a biblically-defined God exists — in whose image we have been created and in whom, according to the Bible, “we live and move and have our being.”

The more recent book, Consciousness Finally Explained: A Perfect Synthesis of God and Brain is the shorter and easier read — but not as complete with respect to how the anatomy, physiology and biochemistry of the brain function on the basis of infinity anticipation — the equivalent to which is the Second Law and its thwarting by the expectable and matchable finitude of an image.