Consciousness.  We all experience it, we all know we experience it.  But to this day we do not know, precisely, what it is or how it came to be.  Some would say it is a work of God, others would say that it is an emergent property driven by system complexity, others would say that it may be a blend of both, and still others would say that it just is.
     I thought anew about consciousness as I was reading in Ecclesiastes 11 and Psalm 139 a few days ago.  In Ecclesiastes 11, the writer opines that no one knows how bones are formed in the womb of a woman, nor does anyone know how humans come into life (the Hebrew actually says, "how the spirit [the spirit of life] comes into the bones")  In Psalm 139, the writer notes that God knew his unformed substance when he was still in the womb, that he skillfully knit him together, and that before he was ever born, God knew what the span of his life would be.
     These verses raise very difficult questions, not all of them having to do with consciousness.  If God "knew" a person's unformed substance and "skillfully" knit it together in a woman's womb, should we conclude that God makes people to be mentally retarded or congenitally deformed?  Should we conclude that despite all the chemical reactions that spur the growth of an egg in a woman's womb, ultimately it is God who enables the egg to have what we call life?  Where does "life" come from?  Is it really just a response to chemical interaction and exchange?  If so, how are we to view it?
     In this brief blog, we cannot address these questions in great detail.  We can say, however, that if we hold that God is absent from the world and the processes that brought it to be, though we then do not need to worry about whether he is actively "deforming" people, we remain bewildered by the puzzle of existence:  why?  Why existence?  And what really is life?  How can impersonal chemical interactions produce sentience?
     If on the other hand we hold that God is indeed present and working in the world and the processes that brought it to be, we face perhaps even bigger challenges:  if God is the author of life, why does he allow people to be born who are not fully equipped to deal with it?  How does he interact with human physiology?  What does he most want?
     In the end, we have a choice.  One, we can continue to muddle through the troublesome enigma of consciousness and existence, living and seeking to understand them, and then dying to be no more.  Two, we can continue to stumble along in our human darkness before God while we strive to believe that if he is the omnipotent and unknowable creator, he at least knows what life means.  And if this is the case, one day, we will know, too.