Why Atheists Keep Finding God (in everything) - Alex O’Connor - #1175

Consciousness Can't Be Defined Using Science as It Is the Investigative Tool

Alex O’Connor asserts that consciousness is the foundational question of philosophy because nothing precedes it—every experience, object, or knowledge is mediated through consciousness. One never begins with objects themselves—such as a table or a microphone—but with the experience of those objects. All knowledge, language, and perception are filtered through conscious experience.

This creates the "consciousness paradox": consciousness observes everything else but cannot stand apart to observe itself, just as one cannot point a flashlight at itself. It resists boundaries or definitions because the act of defining always uses consciousness as the tool; there is no external vantage point from which to "look at" consciousness. Every experience in the universe is contained within and revealed by conscious awareness, so asking what lies "outside" consciousness is meaningless—nothing can be outside of it.

Any attempt to define consciousness using language exposes a circularity. All definitions rely on prior understanding of other words, and ultimately on lived experience—for instance, a child learns "table" or "red" not from words alone but by experiencing those sensations directly. If a person had never seen the color red, no amount of description or science could communicate what it is like to see red. Similarly, subjective experiences such as the blueness of blue escape any reduction to mathematical or objective scientific frameworks. The nature of consciousness is inaccessible by the very scientific apparatuses it enables.

Science Describes Behavior, Doesn't Explain the Nature of Reality

Science, O’Connor argues, is a descriptive enterprise: it explains how things behave, not what they are in themselves. Scientific methodologies—Newton’s laws or atomic theory—describe the appearances and behaviors of phenomena, not their foundational substance. Newton's laws, for example, prescribe the motion of bodies under gravity, but not why gravity exists or what fundamentally causes it.

The distinction between a thing’s appearance and its essential nature was famously articulated by Immanuel Kant: "phenomena" are the appearances of things within conscious awareness, while "noumena" refer to things-in-themselves, entirely inaccessible. All science can access is phenomena; it never reveals the noumena, the ultimate reality behind appearances.

When it comes to consciousness, assuming science will ultimately explain it mistakes the mapping of brain processes—"neural correlates"—for the subjective experience itself. Neural activity can be described in physical terms, but subjective feeling (what it is like for someone to experience something) cannot be captured by these methods. Science’s progress toward greater objectivity continually moves away from the realm of subjectivity and conscious experience, not closer to it.

Regaining Sight Reveals Consciousness' Irreducible Subjective Content Beyond Scientific Color Knowledge

A vivid illustration is the thought experiment in which someone blind from birth learns all possible scientific knowledge about sight and color. Even after mastering every objective fact about color and vision, this person would not truly know what blue [or red] "is" until seeing it for themselves. Upon gaining sight, the direct experience would add something fundamentally new that cannot be written down or reduced to equations. This reveals the irreducible, ...

Debate On God's Existence Fails Due to Misconceived Audience and Purpose

Alex O’Connor argues that philosophical debates about God’s existence often misfire because they mistake their audience and their intended purpose. Many people hold their beliefs or disbeliefs for reasons that are often not deeply considered—sometimes simply due to upbringing or surface-level counterarguments like the problem of evil. O'Connor contends that balancing arguments such as evil versus fine-tuning results in riddles rather than resolution and that philosophy, unlike fields like physics, doesn’t accumulate consensus or stable progress.

Natural Theology: Anselm's "Faith Seeking Understanding" Deepens Believers' Faith

O’Connor highlights Anselm of Canterbury as an exemplar of the true purpose of natural theology. Anselm’s original intention for his ontological argument was an exercise in “Faith Seeking Understanding.” Its goal was never to convince skeptics but to deepen and color an already-held belief. For Anselm, philosophical reflection about God is meant to help believers understand the nature of their faith.

Theological Arguments Like Anselm's Ontological Argument Were Prayers Reflecting On Divine Nature, Not Persuasive Discourse For Skeptics

O’Connor points out that Anselm’s ontological argument first appeared in a book that functioned as a prayer. It was never addressed to atheists or intended as a persuasive tool against non-believers, but rather as a spiritual reflection. Throughout religious history, most arguments categorized as natural theology—arguments for God’s existence drawn from observation and reason—appear relatively late, and for much of history, faith was primarily supported through personal spiritual or mystical means.

Religious Philosophy: Mysticism's Long Reign Over Natural Theology

Further supporting this, O’Connor notes that for much of religious history, the most profound expressions of religious conviction have come through direct experience of the divine rather than through logical proof.

Direct Apprehension of Divine Reality in Religious Experience and Mystical States

O’Connor points to many religious philosophers who, after mystical experiences, regarded theological argument as secondary or even superfluous.

Aquinas and Others Abandoned Theology After Mystical States, Suggesting Direct Experience Outweighs Rational Proof

One striking example is Thomas Aquinas, who left his monumental work, the Summa Theologica, incomplete after a mystical experience during the Eucharist. Aquinas told his confidant he could write no more because everything he had written seemed like straw compared to what he had experienced. For Aquinas and others, mystical experience superseded theology.

Pascal's Distinction: "God of Abraham" vs. "God of Philosophers" Reflects Experiential vs. Intellectual Knowledge

Blaise Pascal also drew a distinction between the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”—the God known through direct experience—and the more abstract “God of the philosophers.” Pascal, after his mystical experience, wrote that God is not an intellectual proposition but a living reality encountered through experience.

Non-dual Experiences Across Cultures and Religions

O’Connor describes mystical unity with the divine as a recurring theme across diverse religions. He cites Meister Eckhart in Christianity, who claimed the ground of God and the ground of the soul are one, and a Sufi mystic who declared, “Ana Al Haq, I am the truth.” These statements reflect the non-dual experience of unity with ultimate reality, a phenomenon commonly reported across mystical religious traditions.

Mystical Experience and Polytheistic vs. Monotheistic Religious Knowing

Polytheistic vs. Monotheistic: Gods in Creation vs. Transcendent Reality

O’Connor distinguishes between the roles attributed to gods in polytheistic systems, where they are characters immanent in the world, and the transcendent, foundational reality posited by monotheism. In Hinduism, for instance, while many gods are worshiped, they are all ultimately expressions of the ultimate singular reality, Brahman.

Unclear if Ancient Peoples Literally Believed In Gods Like Zeus

O’Connor raises the question of whether ancient Greeks literally believed in their gods as actual beings dwelling atop mountains or walking among them, or if this belief operated on a more symbolic, narrative, or participatory level. He likens it to the contemporary child’s relationship with a stuffed animal—imbued with per ...

Alex O’Connor explores the philosophical boundaries of science and the challenges facing materialism as an explanatory framework for reality, especially in relation to consciousness.

Materialism's Definitional and Conceptual Problems Defining Matter Over Behavior

O’Connor begins by probing the very concept of materialism: the claim that the universe is made out of “matter.” He raises the problem of what matter actually is—beyond just atoms or particles. When pressed for a definition, the description always falls back to how these entities behave. For example, an electron is defined by its negative charge and how it interacts (repelling other negative particles), but the essence of what an electron “is” remains unexplained. O’Connor cites Bertrand Russell’s observation that science describes how things act, not their underlying substance.

Materialists may assert they believe in “whatever can be described by science.” O’Connor counters that this collapses materialism into a view exclusively about observable behaviors, with no account of the “thing” doing the behaving—raising the oddity that only behavior is real, without any substance behind it. He points to quantum physics interpretations where even foundational elements like electrons are either clouds of mathematical probability or results of branching realities, further emphasizing that physical explanations often only describe mathematical or behavioral properties, not the underlying nature of reality.

He argues that science as a descriptive enterprise is structurally incapable of proving its own presuppositions, such as the existence of other minds, the external world, or the foundational laws of logic. These are assumed in the act of scientific investigation, not demonstrated by it. O’Connor concludes that maybe the only answer to what constitutes the foundational substance of reality is: we don’t know, and science cannot access or reveal it.

Materialism, by focusing on what things do rather than what they are, becomes conceptually precarious. O’Connor finds it philosophically unsettling to claim that all reality has is behavior—with no substantive entity enacting it.

Consciousness From Matter Is as Problematic as Thoughts Creating Matter

O’Connor critiques the common materialist assertion that if matter is arranged with sufficient complexity, consciousness will simply “emerge.” He illustrates this with typical emergence analogies: no single atom is “hot,” but many together produce temperature; a digital image emerges from arrangements of zeros and ones. However, he notes that all such examples of emergence involve conscious experience: the sensation of heat, the perception of an image, are only ‘real’ for a conscious observer. Descriptions that reduce temperature to the average vibrational velocity of atoms still leave out the feeling of warmth, which is itself a conscious phenomenon.

He challenges the plausibility of consciousness simply arising from non-conscious matter, arguing that it is no more intuitively or logically supported than the converse idea that arranging thoughts in a specific way could create physical matter. Both proposals, he suggests, are equally mysterious and unexplained.

O’Connor argues that when materialists claim consciousness emerges from complexity, they provide only analogies, not explanations. Each time, the analogy relies ultimately on conscious experience as the thing being explained, rather than showing how consciousness could in fact arise from mere ...

Alex O’Connor explores the idea that consciousness is not an emergent byproduct of matter but the foundational substance of reality. He draws on traditions of idealism and panpsychism, and connects these Western philosophical tendencies to Eastern metaphysics and the philosophy of Spinoza. O’Connor also considers how meditation and psychedelic experiences point toward a foundational consciousness underlying the apparent multiplicity of reality.

Consciousness as Reality's Foundation, Not Emerging From Non-conscious Matter

Idealism: Reality as Unified Mental Substance Shared by Consciousnesses

O’Connor explains that under idealism, reality is constituted by a single, unified substance that is mental in nature. This view holds that all individual consciousnesses are expressions or manifestations of this greater universal mind. He notes, "We sort of exist in one great big mind…there is kind of one great big mind and everything exists in consciousness somehow," adding that this vision of reality may sound strange but is no more so than believing in an omnipotent god who creates the universe by fiat.

He uses the analogy of dreaming to clarify idealism: in a dream, perceived objects and distances exist only within the mental substance of the dreamer; questions about the “real” size of objects or rooms lose their meaning because everything is instantiated in a mind. In reality, according to the idealist, all phenomena are like this—expressions within a universal consciousness.

Panpsychism Posits Universal Rudimentary Consciousness, With Human Consciousness as Its Complex Form

Panpsychism, O’Connor continues, suggests consciousness is present at some rudimentary level throughout the universe. While idealism posits one great mind, panpsychism argues that all things—including atoms and electrons—have some primitive form of consciousness or “will,” which in humans becomes more complex and self-reflective. He references the philosophical tradition of attributing a form of inner reality (noumena) to all things, initially felt within oneself, inferred in other people and animals, and possibly extended to all entities in the universe.

Avoid the Impossibility Of Creating Consciousness From Non-conscious Materials While Aligning With Evidence of Consciousness in the Universe

O’Connor emphasizes that idealism and panpsychism have the advantage of not requiring consciousness to emerge inexplicably from entirely unconscious matter—a task that has long vexed philosophers. Since consciousness is directly apprehended in human experience, these frameworks posit it at the foundation of reality itself, rather than as a mysterious late development from non-conscious materials.

Eastern Philosophies Capture Consciousness-Foundational Metaphysics More Accurately Than Western Theology

Hindu Brahman as Impersonal Ultimate Reality Parallel To Idealist Philosophy's Consciousness Claims

O’Connor argues that Indian and Eastern traditions explain the foundational character of consciousness more accurately and intuitively than most Western theologies. He references the Hindu concept of Brahman, an impersonal ultimate reality that resembles the impersonal consciousness posited by idealist philosophy. Brahman is not an agentive god but rather an infinite ocean in which all particular beings, like “whirlpools,” are transient, inseparable expressions.

Consciousness as Whirlpools: A Clearer Analogy Than Western Philosophy For Understanding Minds and Reality

O’Connor finds the analogies used in Indian traditions instructive. Comparing individuals to whirlpools in water, he describes beings as distinct only in form, but never truly separate from the conscious ocean that constitutes them. This analogy, while often dismissed in analytic philosophy for its vagueness, is seen by O’Connor as a valuable tool for grasping the unity of all existence in consciousness.

Advaita Vedanta: Mystical Unity Reflects Reality's Structure

He highlights the Advaita Vedanta school’s insight: mystical experiences of “oneness with everything” reflect an accurate perception of reality’s non-dual structure. Such experiences are interpreted not as hallucinations, but as direct apprehensions of the unity behind apparent multiplicity.

Spinoza's "Deus Sive Natura": Nature as Divine Reality Without Supernatural Agency

Spinoza Sees Reality As a Single Infinite Substance, Expressed In Individuals and Objects, Avoiding Materialist Reductionism and Theistic Dualism

O’Connor refers to Spinoza’s metaphysics as both akin to idealism and a bridge between naturalism and religious metaphysics. Spinoza’s “deus sive natura” (God or Nature) asserts that there is just one infinite substance, manifest in individuals and objects, but without the supernatural agency or dualism typical of Western theism. What is usually called “God” is, for Spinoza, simply the ultimate substance in which all is rooted.

"Spinoza's God: Bridging Naturalism and Metaphysics By Equating Nature With Ultimate Reality"

The elevation of nat ...

The Non-identity Problem: Selecting Future Persons Vs. Harming Existing Individuals Involves Different Ethical Considerations

Chris Williamson and Alex O’Connor discuss the ethical distinction between harming existing individuals and making choices that affect which individuals come into existence. Williamson notes, with reference to Jonathan Anomaly, that selecting one embryo over another means the unselected embryo never develops into a person, so a potential rather than actual person is affected. O’Connor elaborates that this ties into Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem: harming is typically understood as making someone worse off than they would otherwise have been, but when parental choices determine which individual is born, there is no existing individual who is made worse off. For example, if a woman takes a pill to avoid her child being born with a disability, she directly benefits that child. But if she instead times conception to have a different child who doesn’t have that condition, no one has been harmed since a different individual results; the first potential child simply never comes to exist.

O’Connor highlights, using legal cases of “wrongful birth,” the philosophical challenge: we generally feel some reproductive choices are wrong, but if no one is made worse off, standard harm-based ethics cannot explain why. If we accept that these choices are always fine, it opens the way to selective eugenics, as long as gene editing happens before the identity of the future person is determined—through embryo selection, not the editing of an already existing embryo.

Chris Williamson notes that in IVF, embryo selection is already standard, with doctors ranking embryos by quality. In practice, societies already accept screening out embryos with risk for severe disease (such as Huntington’s or Down syndrome, referenced with Iceland's approach). Yet the philosophical distinction means we permit selection against negative traits but have less clarity or comfort around proactively selecting for positive traits. O’Connor asks whether refusing to genetically engineer a child for intelligence or attractiveness is fundamentally different from denying them an education, and emphasizes the cultural intuition that effort and self-control matter: we praise people for advantages they control, like education, not those they don't, like genetics. However, if genetics can be custom-designed, this moral boundary becomes blurred.

O’Connor also argues that disrespecting the arbitrary nature of procreation and attempting to custom-build humans risks a moral error, even without harm to a determinate person.

Genetic Optimization of Future Children Poses Dangers of Perfectionism and Parental Buyer's Remorse Over Philosophical Objections

O’Connor warns that full normalization of genetic selection could mirror the perfectionist cycle seen with cosmetic surgery or [restricted term] obsession, where pursuit of improvement spirals indefinitely. The “arbitrariness and randomness of life” functions as a healthy check, preventing endless optimizations. He suggests that if society fully accepts genetic customization, the result could be a perfectionist arms race in child design, with no natural end point, similar to how repeated cosmetic interventions can spiral into pathology.

Chris Williamson and O’Connor discuss likely psychological consequences for parents. When trait selection becomes normalized, parental involvement in choosing a child’s attributes increases the risk for buyer’s remorse, guilt, resentment, or misplaced pride. O’Connor states he resists any technology or philosophy that could breed in him the feeling of “buyer’s remorse” toward his own child, arguing this would profoundly and negatively shift the parent-child relationship. Accepting or resenting a child’s limitations becomes less about acceptance and love, more about personal responsibility for their design, which erodes unconditional parental acceptance.

Infidelity Stems From Desire, Not Just Action, Hence Non-physical Threat

The conversation shifts to the ethics of cheating and relationships. O’Connor, referencing Jesus’ injunction against “adultery in the heart,” explains that cheating’s core wrongdoing isn’t just physical action but cultivated, proactive desire. Entertaining fantasies about others—even without physical infidelity—is a form of betrayal, reflecting compromise in emotional commitment.

He distinguishes between involuntary thoughts and the proactive entertaining of lustful desires toward someone outside the relationship. While noticing another’s attractiveness isn’t wrong, serious relationships require shutting down such thoughts rather than feeding them.

O’Connor describes pornography consumption as a technologically mediated form of infidelity for many relationships. He argues pornography fosters objectification, correlates with cheating, increases the likelihood of aggressive sexual behavior toward women, and undermines relational trust and intimacy. The primary victims of objectification are women, both those who participate in pornography and those affected indirectly by changing sexual norms and expectations. He notes, supported by evidence, that frequent pornography viewers are more prone to infidelity and to treating women as sexual objects, shifting social norms toward more harmful sexual and relational ...