Consciousness and the Mind of God by Charles Taliaferro


Consciousness and the Mind of God
Title : Consciousness and the Mind of God
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0521673461
ISBN-10 : 9780521673464
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 360
Publication : First published January 1, 1994

Contemporary materialist accounts of consciousness and subjectivity challenge how we think of ourselves and of ultimate reality. This book defends a nonmaterialistic view of persons and subjectivity and the intelligibility of thinking of God as a nonphysical, spiritual reality. It endeavors to articulate in a related way the integral relationship between ourselves and our material bodies and between God and the cosmos. Different versions of materialism are assessed, as are alternative, post-dualist concepts of God.


Consciousness and the Mind of God Reviews


  • Jean-françois Virey

    I was very disappointed by this book, which I had heard of in Victor Reppert's "C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea". It is a defense of the plausibility (rather than truth) of what the author calls "integrative dualism", which I agree with insofar as it can be defined.

    The book for me has been a reminder of how tedious and unserious I find modern philosophy to be. God, for instance, is defined as "omniscient" in the sense that no one could possibly have greater cognitive power than him, just like Miriam, who knows whether a proposition is true or false just by thinking about it, and unlike Eric, who gets all his information from Miriam. So God can be said to be omniscient even though he does not know everything (especially about the future) because nobody possibly could anyway (not even Miriam.)

    There is talk of bodies with eyes all over them, Lucifer X and Lucifer Y, Star Trek-like body swaps and thought experiments about identical clones that make basic mistakes which James Blish avoided in "Spock Must Die!". There are discussions of "important" modern philosophers who "align themselves with Christianity" but are not Christian in any meaningful sense of the term; considerations about Christ's soul (or lack thereof) that totally neglect his descent into Hell; and summaries of arguments that deny that God is a person because persons are the kinds of entities you walk across in supermarket aisles and may have been in school with, and God is not like that.

    Except for the lesson about avoiding similar volumes in the future, the time I spent reading this book has been totally unprofitable.


  • Beth (M) mowry

    With a title like this, how could you not slog your way to the bitter end? But there wasn't any big payoff and philosophers can be so wordy and tedious. It's about the "mind/body problem." Is matter different from mind (dualist) or is it all the same thing? How does consciousness come from inanimate matter? Sorry, no one knows.