Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, has turn metaphysician. He claims to know what the next leap in religion is going to be. We will soon drop the notion of a personal God and become like the Krell as depicted in the Sci-Fi classic film Forbidden Planet (1956). After reaching collective consciousness, the Krell were wiped out in a day by the emergence of their collective “baser selves.” (See the clip at end of this article.) Getting rid of God does not get rid of man’s sinful nature.

Here’s Brown’s prediction:

Humanity no longer needs God but may with the help of artificial intelligence develop a new form of collective consciousness that fulfills the role of religion, author Dan Brown has said…. Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine.

‘We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,’ he said, forecasting the emergence of ‘some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine’.

‘Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us … will diminish and eventually disappear,’ he added.

A “global consciousness” assumes and requires a prior consciousness.

What is the origin of consciousness? Why are we conscious beings? How did consciousness emerge from the Big Bang? Where did the stuff come from to bang? Where did the information come from to organize the stuff that banged to turn unorganized matter into you and me? How did morality arise from the disorganized hot matter that went bang? Matter does not give rise to morality. What evolved biological units will determine what’s moral and what’s not? Who says?

Here’s the bigger question. How does an evolved brain know anything beyond what his senses relay to his evolved brain? C.S. Lewis explained that “a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.’ (Possible Worlds, p. 209).” ((Lewis, Miracles, 15.))

In another place, Lewis explains the significance of an evolved brain:

“If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions…. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself.”1

Rodney Stark makes the following historical and empirical argument about godless societies: “all attempts to sustain godless religions are a resounding failure…. ‘[M]odernist’ theologians who reject the existence of a conscious divine being … have suffered rapid and massive declines in membership. This is because ‘Godless religions’ can offer no otherworldly rewards, no miracles, not even any reason for prayer or worship. Indeed, the phrase ‘godless religion’ is a self-contradictory oxymoron.”2 What makes Dan Brown think it will be any different if God is expunged from our collective consciousness?

Who or what ultimately says that anyone should conform morally to any “global consciousness”? The only way for a godless substitute to work is for some type of forced conformity. There is no neutrality. Some god will emerge, and it won’t be a pretty sight. Communism and Nazism sought after a global consciousness, and we know how that turned out.

Dan Brown’s call for a “Global Consciousness” is a call for a form of collectivism where the individual will ultimately be consumed by an all-encompassing State religion.

“And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do” (Heb. 4:13).

1. C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry,” delivered at the Oxford Socratic Club, 1944, published in They Asked for a Paper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 164–165. [↩]
2. Why God?: Explaining Religious Phenomena (2017), 6-7. [↩]