Americans apologeticist J.P. Moreland and journalist Lee Strobel, both doped up on the good lord, the two debaters on whether or not atheist emergence explanations are valid or bunk.

Moreland: “What doesn’t make sense—and which many atheistic evolutionists are conceding—is the idea of getting a mind to squirt into existence by starting with brute, dead, mindless matter. That’s why some of them are trying to get rid of consciousness by saying that it’s not real and that we’re just computers.”

Strobel: “Still, some scientists maintain that consciousness is just something that happens as a natural byproduct of our brain’s complexity. They believe that once evolution gave us sufficient brain capacity, consciousness inexorably emerges as a biological process.”

Moreland: “Let me mention four problems with that. First, they are no longer treating matter as atheists and naturalist treat matter—namely, as brute stuff that can be completely described by the laws of chemistry and physics. Now they’re attributing spooky, soulish, or mental potentials to matter.”

Strobel: “What do you mean by ‘potentials’?”

Moreland: “They’re saying that prior to this level of complexity, matter contained the potential for mind to emerge—and at the right moment, guess what happened? These potentials were activated and consciousness was sparked into existence!”

Strobel: “What’s wrong with that theory?”

Moreland: “That’s no longer naturalism. That’s panpsychism.”

Strobel: “Pan what?”

Moreland: “Panpsychism. It’s the view that matter is not just inert physical stuff, but that it also contains proto-mental states in it. Suddenly, they’ve abandoned a strict scientific view of matter and adopted a view that closer to theism than to atheism. Now they’re saying that the world began not just with matter, but with stuff that’s mental and physical at the same time. Yet they can’t explain where these pre-emergent mental properties came from in the first place.”