We are Brain Fizz

nope ... if you are a pool of electro-chemical processes .... you have no basis to claim any rights .......... no right to say anything is right or wrong ... it is just a chemical pool doing its chemical pool thing ..... no right to say anything is good or bad ... it is just a chemical pool doing its chemical pool thing ..... no right to say anything is free or not ... it is just a chemical pool doing its chemical pool thing ..... no right to say anything is anything ... it is just a chemical pool doing its chemical pool thing .... you have given up any claim to anything .... because all you are is a chemical pool .......... it is your lot in life .... not sure what happens when any chlorine gets in there .........

I located this quote on Fundies Say the Darnedest Things, a snarky website that exists not to foster any kind of real dialogue but rather to laugh at the horror and lameness that is some of the worst thought on the intertubes. I apologize for subjecting you to the interspersed randomly-numbered ellipses, but they are part of the original and in addition to looking like someone was having a yard sale on full stops I think they are symbolic of the empty-thinking-dressed-as-philosophy of the commenter.

I have heard various forms of the central, ahem, point of the comment from other apologists, usually of the presuppositionalist strain, which amounts to how can we have any kind of thought if there's no god? You might hear that without a god, it's just our brain fizzing or we are only chemicals in motion. The above comment is a particularly annoying form of the argument.

To elaborate a bit, from a religious point of view, everything that we think comes from a deity, specifically our logic and our morals. As best I can work out, consciousness for such people amounts to a piece of god planted in our brain. It is connected to this higher being and will go back to him upon death. Without this, presuppositionalists say there is no way to explain why we have a little voice in our head going through cogitations, and atheists have to "borrow from" their worldview in order to justify their philosophical musings. In the crude renderings of the quote: if humans are "just" a chemical pool doing a chemical pool thing, there is no justification for morals, claims to rights, logic, your purpose in life, anything.

And this is just asanine.

And backwards. For starters, you need to demonstrate that your god exists. You don't get to just assume that there is a god behind everything and tell me that I don't make any sense without it.

It's true we don't have perfect explanations for consciousness right now. I'm certainly no expert, but the moderate amount of reading I've done points to the notion that consciousness is an emergent property of our brains. In addition to the study we've done of ourselves, examinations of other animals show varying degrees of thinking, language, and self-awareness. We have observed problem-solving and tool use in animals, and we have found indications of fairness and empathy in animals. Do those animals also have souls? Are they hooked up to the higher power?

Who knows, maybe some of these pre-sups would say yes or that god has some purpose in creating them that way. Just from a scientific point of view, it would appear that life evolved a certain way, and our abilities are a product of natural selection. We are on a spectrum of ability to think and reason, to empathize and want rules to govern our interactions because we are social animals that thrive in community.

What our research has not shown is any kind of soul, connection to supernatural powers, or god. I'm not saying those things don't exist, but we have no reason to presume they do. So saying that our brains need a god to be able to have logic and make claims about the world is an assertion without evidence.

What it comes down to is we are a being that is animated by various physical properties that mean we are able to think, perceive ourselves and others in the world, conceive of our own eventual death, and dream about what would make our life better (or worse). For those of us who want our fantasies of improvement to become reality, we have imagined what it takes: what rights we have, what is harmful or beneficial, how much freedom is correct without harming others (so that we are not harmed by others), and so on.

We may in fact be a chemical pool, but we are a chemical pool that knows what it is and wants a good existence. No need for god in any of that.