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Is consciousness everywhere? In every rock and atom? That is what panpsychists like the philosopher Philip Goff believe. They urge us to revolutionize or abandon physics itself to accommodate consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality.

This view will sound absurd to most readers, yet it has gained surprising attention over the past decade. The attention puzzles me until I remind myself that we have seen this pattern before.

When progress in Darwinian biology threatened cherished beliefs about human uniqueness and about our special place in nature, creationists urged us to reject Darwin rather than accept that we are continuous with nature. The fact that science slowly unearths more details about our evolutionary origins, rather than revealing them in one simple stroke, as if our history could be told on a single page, was taken as a reason to reject evolutionary biology wholesale.

Of course, this is unfortunately not too surprising. We know that scientific evidence is frequently discounted when it conflicts with cherished beliefs. Panpsychism, unfortunately, follows the same logic as earlier creationism. Consciousness is treated as something magical, to be admired rather than explained, lest scientific reduction rob it of the

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