Choosing a faith

(Note that "it" refers to consciousness).There is, indeed, a conscious intelligence behind it -- our own conscious intelligence. We build it up as we grow and develop.

Not really. It is boot strapping.

Great. Let us know how that goes.

Have you ever booted a computer? It starts with very limited capabilities, until it loads enough code to get fully going.A newborn child starts with very limited abilities, and has to use those to learn how to deal with the world. Much of our consciousness comes from what we learn.

That's interesting.I also preferred Bart's view. But that's to be expected, because I left Christianity. Yes, I agree with that.Bart's view was, I think, very much influenced by his bicycle accident.

In high school, one of my classmates was injured in a traffic accident. It was a head injury. He was in the hospital for many months. When he returned, his personality had completely changed. It made me wonder about things like souls. For Bart, it was his own head injury and I expect the effect on him was quite profound.I saw Bart as my kind of Christian. I always saw humanism as a central part of Christianity. Part of why I left Christianity, was that the church seemed opposed to humanism.

Thanks for that link.I watched the video. It is not a video version of the book, but it is consistent with the book.

Emotions, psychology.

The apologists all say that there is lots of evidence.At around age 17, I reread the account of the resurrection in Matthew. And it was too fantastical to be believed. If something that fantastical actually happened, word would have spread and there would be multiple reports of it. But there aren't any such reports.That's when I stopped believing in a physical resurrection.

I don't think we are just our brains. Rather, we are our brains, our bodies and our environment. They can react to things going on around them, but I would not call that "awareness". The belief that the placebo will help does likely have material effects on the brain.

That's not a real argument. Our interaction with our environment also affects the brain chemistry. The chemical reactions in the brain are responses to what is happening around us.Personally, I think we have some sort of free will, but I cannot define what that means. Then that woman was not brain dead and was not in a vegetative state. If there were material effects, there were physical changes. But those physical changes might have been too small to easily detect.

This is surely wrong.The thoughts are not the chemical reactions. Rather, the chemical reactions are an implementation detail.Suppose you drive from Sidney to Vancouver. That works by chemical reactions. So your motion is just chemical reactions, and therefore you could never get to Vancouver.I have just paraphrased your argument to show that it is problematic. We detect the healing. But we may not be able to identify the specific physical changes.The brain is not static. There are physical changes going on all the time. And your brain is not isomorphic to my brain, so we don't have a general theory to explain the details of what changes. Yes, there are many gaps in our knowledge.

I mostly agree with that. However, there is no actual evidence of any external influence.

Yes, but we set those goals for ourselves. We don't like to have them imposed on us from outside.

It is interesting to see how phake Christians try to explain away the parts they don't like.