Martin,

There’s no question that consciousness remains one of life’s greatest mysteries. In keeping with my essay, I would only say that in light of this mystery, we have no reason to resort to a supernatural or religious claim as a provisional or tentative answer because a) religions don’t explain anything and b) there is no evidence that consciousness has a super-natural cause (deliberate hyphen for emphasis).

You’re correct to say that, at the moment, science can’t tell us what consciousness is or how “it” emerges or how it exists at all, but this doesn’t give us license to leap toward a religious-inspired answer because, again, no religion has anything of value to say about the nature of our world and of existence. The best answer anyone can say — Daniel Dennett will disagree with me — when I asked about how consciousness exists or works is “I don’t know.”

You may be interested to read one of my favorite books on the subject: “The Mysterious Flame” by Colin McGinn. A line from the dust jacket copy: “Arguing that we can never truly ‘know’ consciousness — that the human intellect is simply not equipped to unravel this mystery — he demonstrates that accepting this limitation in fact opens up a whole new field of investigation.”