The Easy and Hard Problem of Consciousness

Human consciousness has long been a hot topic in science and faith conversations. Many scientists and philosophers have made bold claims as to what we have discovered about what consciousness is or isn’t. Often, a materialist account is boldly asserted that confidently claims that we, and our so-called conscious experiences, are fundamentally just the workings of our brains. There is no center-of-the-self beyond this. There is no soul. At the core of who we are, there is nothing but a blob of gray matter doing its biologically mechanistic thing.

The Easy Problem

Unfortunately, this idea is very prevalent within the popular understanding of science, even if its many problems are swept under the rug. Philosopher David Chalmers famously made a distinction between the easy and hard problems of consciousness. The easy problem essentially deals with the material aspect of the brain’s activity. What portions of the brain activate when exposed to certain internal or external stimuli? The easy problem is heavily focused on the where in the brain. Science can robustly demonstrate and explain so many of these easy areas of brain activity. 

The Hard Problem

Things get messier with the hard problem. Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel claims that, “Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science [to explain reality].” Hence, the subtitle to his book Mind and Cosmos is: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Once we move beyond the easy problem of consciousness, which is very friendly to materialism, the hard problem questions get much more complicated and far less convenient for the materialist. 

The hard problem seeks to address how the various stimuli acting upon and within the brain produce and generate the actual experience of consciousness. How do the outward and objective produce the inward and subjective? Ross Douthat summaries it as follows:

The hard problem is taking these correlations and using them to figure out how inputs and stimuli working on the underlying physical systems actually generate the experience of mind. It’s one thing to say that electrical impulses in this or that portion of the cortex are associated with certain kinds of thought. It’s quite another to explain how those impulses create all the subjectivities of human experience.¹

There simply is no brain mechanism known that explains how this experience came to be. Even if the mechanical aspects can be described, the final thing produced is beyond the material itself. Again, Ross Douthat puts it like this:

So when the confident Clinton-era neuroscientists told Tom Wolfe that they had opened the brain and found no single seat of self-awareness, no organ where the mind or soul sits throbbing happily away, they were undermining their own confident materialism, not confirming it. If you can’t find the source and substance of a phenomenon even when its material substrate is laid bare before you, then you haven’t successfully reduced the phenomenon to that substrate or otherwise explained its origin. You’ve just discovered an apparent limit to your material investigation.² 

Material Science and Limits

One of the main issues with mainstream modern science is its own self-limiting methodological practices and commitments. With religious-like zeal, mainstream science holds that all true science must adhere to strictly natural explanations and conclude that all aspects of reality, nature, humanity, the universe, you name it, are, at their core, material in their nature. This is, of course, obviously rubbish. 

As philosopher Alvin Plantinga quips:

Of course the argument form, 

If X were true, it would be inconvenient for science; therefore X is false,

is at best moderately compelling. We aren’t just given that the Lord has arranged the universe for the comfort and convenience of the National Academy of Science. To think otherwise would be like the drunk who insisted on looking for his lost car keys under the streetlight, on the grounds that the light was better there. (In fact it would go with the drunk one better: it would be to insist that because the keys would be hard to find in the dark, they must be under the light.)³  

It is obvious to anyone not already committed to the naturalistic system that these types of a-priori philosophical commitments to both methodology and conclusions are artificial and unconvincing. To say one has found the truth, while willingly refusing to entertain all hypotheses before one even set out for the journey, is a bit of a joke. As philosopher of science Stephen Meyer points out: “Shouldn’t the evidence, rather than an abstract rule like methodological naturalism, decide the outcome of a scientific investigation?”⁴ Unfortunately, methodological naturalism has become so subconsciously ingrained within mainstream scientific practice, that the obviousness of Meyer’s statement is not only ignored, but often ridiculed. 

Knowledge Revealed Gaps

This brings us back to the hard problem of consciousness. Although certainly not the only area, it is one that most aggressively pushes back on materialist commitments and conclusions. It is when using strictly material means while looking for strictly material outcomes that one has to start asking fresh questions and considering other means, when what we know about a given thing, such as the brain and matter and consciousness, specifically reveals that the explanation requires us to go beyond such means. As C. John Collins writes in a similar context:

 In other words, there are gaps and then there are gaps. First, there are gaps due to ignorance (Latin: lacunae ignorantiae causā), which are simply gaps in our knowledge, which may eventually be filled. But there are also gaps due to nature (Latin: lacunae nature causā) of the things involved: The result goes beyond what these natural properties would have brought about.⁵ 

We know quite a bit about both the mechanisms of the brain and the nature of conscious experience. What we do not know is not so much a result of ignorance rather than it is a gap revealed by knowledge. What we know is taking us beyond the tools we are using and showing us that we might just need a new set of tools for what lies ahead. 

Notes:

1. Ross Douthat, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2025), 48
2. Ibid. 49
3. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), 406
4. J.P. Moreland, Stephen C. Meyer, Christopher Shaw, Ann K. Gauger, and Wayne Grudem, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique (Crossway: Wheaton, IL, 2017), 566
5. C. John Collins, Reading Genesis Well: Navigating History, Poetry, Science, and Truth in Genesis 1-11, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), 273