Consciousness is never something I’ve thought very deeply about in the past. In my younger days I would’ve thought of it as the soul that is a separate substance from the body. Later on I would’ve seen it as an emergent property of physical processes where consciousness is simply the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. However, upon reading David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being Consciousness Bliss, I actually engaged for the first time what all the features of consciousness entail and whether or not emergence or other aspects of mechanical nature are sufficient to explain it.

Thirteen years ago I was browsing at a bookstore — I don’t remember which one or where. I came across an apologetics book by Peter Kreeft, a Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher. I don’t even remember the title, but I remember skimming a section where he argued that Genesis can be read metaphorically. That stuck with me, and I decided to actually give evolution a fair shot. My background was entirely the other direction.