Making Sentience

At the Dawkins evening one of the questions was about sentience and how it could have arisen. The answer given was that it must have been through natural selection but no one knows how. It would be easy to jump right in to the old ‘god of the gaps’ trap here and say ‘Aha! That’s the bit that God did!’ but that would be foolish. A) because the gap may close and B) because the implication is that God wasn’t involved in any other part.

By natural selection or some other means God has created us as sentient beings. What that means is that we are aware of ourselves. If you think about it, the most logical way for a completely natural process to go would be toward something akin to a computer i.e. something capable of completing tasks of ever-increasing complexity but without ever actually being self-aware. It’s amazing how far artificial intelligence has come, we only have to look at computer games to see that, but it is a completely blind intelligence

Yet we are not computers. We have a highly developed sense of who we are and who others are. God has created us to be aware of ourselves, and aware of Him.