When it comes to dinner party conversations, thereâs an old trick which can turn an ordinarily nescient question into one of supreme profundity and significance. Itâs called the âreally?â trick, and it can be mustered to great effect when topics of conversation shift to an area that an attendee is partially or even wholly unfamiliar with. Itâs an easy trick. You simply tack on âreally?â to a query that would otherwise reveal the depths of your ignorance: Who was Michael Jackson, really? What is particle physics, really? When did the Arab Spring begin, really? And every other guest suddenly feels like a dilettante and supercilious pinhead in the presence of a sagacious and evidently superior intellect. Itâs a nifty trick, but more than simply demonstrating canny and wit, it reveals that with respect to the essence of famous figures, ultimate reality, history, and a myriad of other subjects, scholars and sages throughout the ages have barely scratched the surface. A real and comprehensive understanding of these things has not been achieved and the idea of a consensus on any of them, even the most puerile, seems utterly out of reach. After all, different disciplines emphasize different things, and what might seem like a comprehensive account of Michael Jackson to a pop music enthusiast will differ wildly from the account given by an expert in plastic surgery. They will not tell the same story. And thatâs fine. When it comes to a full account of Michael Jackson, or even of particle physics or the Arab Spring, differences of opinion are unlikely to upset things because while MJ, physics, and Middle East happenings may be interesting, they are irrelevant to most peopleâs everyday lives. In discussing them, thereâs very little on the line. However, there is at least one topic of conversation that, should the âreally?â trick be applied, it will doubtlessly enliven and very likely ruin the night because everyone is going to have an opinion, and theyâll probably be ready to fight. That topic of conversation is the nature of humanity, and the construction of the night-ruining query would be: what are human beings, really? If a scientific materialist and a committed religious adherent are amongst the guests, that question is going to result in thrown fists because, as Duke University Professor of Philosophy and Neurobiology Owen Flanagan has noted, âConflict between the spaces of science and spirituality is one of the most familiar zones of conflict among the spaces of meaning that constitute the Space of Meaning.â And that conflict, in the words of Cornell University co-founder Andrew Dickson White, has been âa war continued longerâwith battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfare of Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon.â In other words, hold onto your napkins because cutlery will be going for carotids. And yet, even as the other guests do their best to separate the scientific materialist and religious adherent from corporal exsanguination or premature entry into Heaven (depending on who you ask), theyâll be listening intently to the shouting match, because theyâll grasp that an answer to that question is of ultimate and personal importance to them. After all, The Dalai Lama himself has well said, âHow we view ourselves and the world around us cannot help but affect our attitude and our relations with our fellow beings and the world we live in.â So, what are human beings, really? To that question, there are various and sundry responses, many of them competing if not wholly contradictory, and the task of this paper will be to survey those offered by the scientific and religious, specifically Buddhist and Christian, communities, in the hopes that through their comparison, it might be easier to see which offers the most satisfying, comprehensive, and real account of human beings.
We Are Beasts
In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, famed evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin wrote this: âMan is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits.â In the century and a half since, Darwinâs conception of man as simply the latest phase in the evolutionary chain has become an article of âsecular faith,â and, in light of this, per University of Chicago Paleontologist Neil Shubin, it is widely believed that âWe [humans] are not exceptional to any great degree. Weâre just a twig on a giant evolutionary tree that includes everything.â Agreeing with Shubin, yet another UChicago professor, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, has said that thanks to Darwin, human beings have been âdethronedâ from natureâs pinnacle. Far from being its crowning achievement, we are simply another mammalian beast, cousin and kin to every other creeping, crawling thing, differing from other critters not in kind but merely in degree. As Nazi Adolf Eichmann put it in Operation Finale: âWeâre all animals fighting for scraps on the Serengeti. Some of us just have bigger teeth.â This conception of human beings, while seemingly coherent and in line with evolutionary biology, presents a difficulty, not just for dentists but for any appeal to ethics or morality because the animal kingdom is governed by one principle: survival. And that puts pretty much anything, from rape to murder to cannibalism, on the table. Crudely, if human beings, in the words of The Bloodhound Gang, âainât nothinâ but mammals,â why then should we not âdo it like they do on the Discovery Channel?â For one reason, most people find such a position untenable. Moreover, and perhaps more tellingly, most people do not want to live as animals, slaves to nature, red in tooth and claw. However, others claim our behavior isn’t even up to us at all.
We Are Meat Machines
In Richard Dawkinsâ book River Out of Eden, he contends that human beings are basically, to use the words of MIT professor Marvin Minsky, âmeat machines.â We are at the mercy of a âuniverse of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replicationâ within which we are beholden to the music being played by our DNA. That is, when it comes to what we think and do, we essentially have no say. We simply follow the predetermined firing of the neurons in our brain. Dr. Jerry Coyne, fellow atheist, has put it this way:
The notion of âfree willââa linchpin of many faithsânow looks increasingly dubious as scientists not only untangle the influence of our genes and environments on our behavior, but also show that some âdecisionsâ can be predicted from brain scans several seconds before people are conscious of having made them. In other words, the notion of pure âfree will,â the idea that in any situation we can choose to behave in different ways, is vanishing. Most scientists and philosophers are now physical âdeterministsâ who see our genetic makeup and environmental history as the only factors that, acting through the laws of physics, determine which decisions we make.
Historically, this has been a dangerous take. Reflecting on the fruit such a conception of human beings bore in Nazi Germany, Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl had this to say:
If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, âof Blood and Soil.â I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
It behooves us to take Dr. Franklâs warning seriously. After all, the belief that human beings are essentially meat machines has not only led to Nazism, but has historically removed all grounds for moral responsibility.
In 1924, during the infamous trial of Leopold and Loeb which covered the case of two University of Chicago students who murdered and mutilated a young boy simply because they thought it was in keeping with Nietzschean philosophy, their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, made the case that they werenât responsible for what took place, rather, it was their genes and multi-million dollar upbringing that were to blame:
I know that one of two things happened to this boy [Loeb]; that this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and came from some ancestor, or that it came through his education and his training after he was born.
Darrowâs appeal to evolutionary biology and environmental psychology kept Leopold and Loeb alive, but their survival came at a tremendous price, requiring that they be conceived not as moral agents, possessing the ability to choose whether to be good or bad, but as the predetermined product of their genes and environment. In C.S. Lewisâ essay, âThe Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,â he notes that this conceptual move, seemingly humane, turns a âperson, a subject of rightsâ into âa mere object, a patient, a case.â If human beings are nothing but meat machines, mere products of upbringing and ancestry, moral agency and responsibility lose all significance. They become figments lost to an infinite regress while human beings themselves become genetically and environmentally pre-determined gag reflexes, needing to be force-fed a suppressant or antacid. Itâs a harsh position to take and the genocidal/megalomaniacal tendencies it engenders, seem, to some, to indicate that an error, either in first principles or reasoning, has been made. At the very least, hardcore scientific materialists have not laid out a particularly winsome or compelling case.
âBut so what?â snaps the committed scientific materialist. âThose are the facts.â
âAre they, though?â The Dalai Lama asks. âBecause last I checked, reality, including our own existence, is so much more complex.â
We Are Illusory
The Buddhist account of human beings offers an alternative to both materialistsâ conceits that we are either beasts or meat machines. With respect to the first, Buddhists say that whilst humans and animals are both sentient, we possess a unique (or at the very least, a much greater) capacity to consciously control our thoughts, feelings, and actions. That consciousness, for Buddhists, is the primary feature of life, and, in the words of Professor, Buddhist, and Neurobiologist Owen Flanagan, âCome what may, no nasty reductionist or materialist will be in any position to say that consciousness is an illusion or that you donât make choices.â The Buddhist conception of human beings thereby restores a belief in moral agency and responsibility (understandable, given their corresponding doctrine of karmic causality). However, while consciousness and agency are not illusions on the Buddhist account, Buddhism completely denies that human beings, or anything, has a unique, essential self.
This doctrine, called âthe theory of emptiness,â holds that âfrom the perspective of the ultimate truth, things and events do not possess discrete, independent realities. Their ultimate ontological status is âemptyâ in that nothing possesses any kind of essence or intrinsic being.â The Dalai Lama has expanded on this, writing,
In our day to day experience, we tend to relate to the world and to ourselves as if these entities possess self-enclosed, definable, discrete, and enduring reality. For instance, if we examine our own conception of selfhood, we will find that we tend to believe in the presence of an essential core to our being, which characterizes our individuality and identity as a discrete ego, independent of the physical and mental elements that constitute our existence. The philosophy of emptiness reveals that this is not only a fundamental error but also the basis for attachment, clinging, and the development of our numerous prejudices.
Put simply, Buddhists believe that the root of human suffering is bound up in our mistaken belief that we have an essential self. For Buddhists, the self is an illusion, but once we get past that idea, all will be well.
In Margaret Atwoodâs Booker Prize-winning novel, The Blind Assassin, the narrator, Iris, asks the reader,
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while weâre still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on a fire hydrant⊠What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. We canât stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.
Itâs as if we canât help ourselves. The desire to assert our own discrete existence is powerful. We do not want to be a radio running down, crackles subsumed in and absorbed by all other sounds. And yet, the Buddhist says, accepting that we do not individually exist, that our sense of intrinsic self is an illusion, is the first step towards freedom from suffering and enlightenment.
Is it?
In Netflixâs 2021 film The Unforgivable, Ruth Slater (played by Sandra Bullock), convicted cop killer, is released on parole and finds society to be, in a word, hostile. Beaten, refused jobs, abandoned by someone she was coming to love, she nevertheless persists with a relatively stiff upper lip. However, itâs when sheâs treated as if she does not exist by her little sisterâs guardians that she finally loses it, crying, âWhat gives you the reason to treat me like I donât exist? Because I exist! I exist!â Itâs being treated like she does not that causes her anguish.
âBut donât you see?â The Buddhist persists. âIf sheâd made peace with the reality of her inexistence and let go of all attachments, sheâd be enlightened. Sheâd be free.â
In the film adaptation of Stephen Kingâs novella Shawshank Redemption, Brooks Haten, a man who has spent fifty years in prison, is finally released. Heâs given a place to stay, a job at the grocery, and of course, his liberty. And yet, he doesnât like it. In correspondence to his friends, he describes himself as constantly afraid and out of place, writing, âI donât like it here⊠Iâve decided not to stay.â He hangs himself the same day, letting go of all attachmentsâhis friends, his place, his job, his very lifeâbut what he does not let go of, even at the end, is his sense of discrete existence. Indeed, his penultimate act is to take out a switchblade and carve above his makeshift gallows, âBROOKS WAS HERE.â A Buddhist would say heâs mistaken. Brooks wasnât there. âBrooksâ wasnât at all. Brooks was an illusion, and like all illusions, with time, they have to fall.
If that makes us uncomfortable, itâs worthwhile to ask whether the Buddhist conception of human beings is wholly accurate because while it may offer a rosier view than the hardcore materialist position which says human beings are just animals or meat machines, it also requires that we deny something we know intuitively. Namely, that there exists a discrete me and a discrete you. However, for others, the issue of whether there is a me or you, or even whether weâre animals or just meat machines, is by and large moot. For them, the most defining characteristic of human beings is our awareness that weâre all going to die soon.
We Are Fleeting
In the 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Cornell Professor Will Provine, a committed materialist and atheist, recounted how he came to this view:
[Evolution] starts by giving up an active deity. Then it gives up the hope that there is any life after death. When you give those two up, the rest of it follows fairly easily. You give up the hope that there is an eminent morality. And finally there is no human free will. If you believe in evolution, you canât hope for there being any free will. Thereâs no hope whatsoever of there being any deep meaning in human life. We live. We die. And weâre gone! Weâre absolutely gone when we die!
For Dr. Provine, the belief that human beings are just passing through is the culmination and capstone of his worldview. From a materialist perspective, die [THE END] is what all human beings are going to do. In the words of evolutionary biologist Dr. Jerry Coyne, âThere is, of course, no empirical evidence for either a soul or its unique presence in humans. Itâs a superfluous religious add on.â We live. We die. And weâre gone.
Strangely, this conception of human beings has not caught on. Perhaps this is because, as Hazel Grace Lancaster points out in The Fault in Our Stars, oblivionâs inevitability discomforts us, impelling many to focus their attention on other things or plead ignorance. But it could also be that some part of us is unconvinced that weâre hurtling towards nothingness. Indeed, our continued desire for life is an interesting, even telling, quirk, given that, on the materialist view, human beings are only guaranteed a return to dirt. Frankly, it is incredibly strange that we should so desire and strive to maintain something we are assuredly going to lose. In fact, the dissonance between our desire for life and reality of death has caused some like Georgetown University Theology Professor John F. Haught to raise the question âDoes time lead inevitably to nothingness or does it flow into an eternity where all events can be remembered and reordered into an unfathomable beauty?â If the former, Jean-Paul Sarte was correct: âOne dies oneâs life. One lives oneâs death.â If the former, what it means to be human is to live with the persistent awareness of impending nothingness. If the former, all our labors and efforts will be, as Saint Augustine said, simply an outpouring of ourselves upon the sand as we watch the tide come in. But. If the latter, then all that we do and all that we are, has real, even ultimate, significance.Â
This second position has historically been found solely amongst religious adherents. However, during the last century, âenlightened secularismâ and secular humanists have been endeavoring to construct an equivalent.
We Are The Measure of All Things
In his book Straw Dogs, Professor Emeritus of The London School of Economics John Gray, describes the ascent and aim of secular humanism this way:
Over the past few hundred years, at least in Europe, religion has waned, but we have not become less obsessed with imprinting a human meaning on things. A thin secular idealism has become the dominant attitude of life. The world has come to be seen as something to be remade in our own image.
For the secular humanist, no divine being exists. Human beings are not made in any Creatorâs imageâwe remain highly evolved chimps. However, breaking with the hardcore materialists, secular humanists claim that we can make a real difference. Though, how this can be when they still believe we donât ultimately have any real free will is just one of those charming inconsistencies. Not a divine, but an intellectual mystery. Regardless, to hear them tell it, human beings are the kings and queens of evolutionary history. The apotheosis of nature, red in tooth in claw, with the power and ability to make the world better for all involved, and riffing off the inimitable words of Hannah Montana, they say, âLifeâs what [we] make it/ So letâs make it rock!â Or, to put it more soberly, according to Dr. Coyne, ââMeaning and purposeâ are human constructs.â Itâs up to us to make sure the world doesnât go belly up. Furthermore, per Carl Coon (former US Ambassador to Nepal and winner of the American Humanist Associationâs Lifetime Achievement Award), âWeâre in charge. The future of life on this planet is in our hands.â Thatâs a heady and heavy position to be in because while we supposedly have the power to make the world over any which way, if it slips through our hands or we fumble the play, no deus ex machina is swooping in to save the day. In point of fact, at the end of the day, the secular humanist has to say, whatever happens, weâve got no one but ourselves to thank, and as it turns out, that is actually worse than having no one but ourselves to blame.
In Shakespeareâs play Coriolanus, the Third Citizen makes the observation:
Ingratitude is monstrous, and for the multitude to be ungrateful were to make a monster of the multitude, of which, we being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members.
On this understanding of what turns human beings into monstrosities, the chief difficulty with secular humanismâs conception of human beings is that it is inherently and ineluctably ungrateful and self-congratulatory, creating, per citizen number three, a pipeline of monstrosity. In her seminal work, Regarding the Pain of Others, humanist Susan Sontag, interpreting Virginia Woolf, demurred on this, saying: âWe are not monsters. We are members of the educated class. Our failure is one of imagination.â Granting the fact that a secular humanist living today would be hard pressed to imagine the gas chambers of Auschwitz, that does not likewise excuse them from being historically illiterate. They are, after all, members of the educated class. Reading should be a habit.
And yet, to assert as humanist thinkers like Steven Pinker do, that humanity is on an upwards trajectory is to admit one has not read, was soundly asleep during the whole of the twentieth century, or else laboring under the effects of hallucinogens. In fact, in the 1997 film Devilâs Advocate, Al Pacino, playing Satan of all people, tells Keanu Reeves, âIâm a fan of man! Iâm a humanist. Maybe the last humanist. Who in their right mind could possibly deny that the twentieth century was mine? All of it!â Yuval Harari, himself a secular humanist, surveying the state of humanity in the twenty-first century, asks at the close of his best-selling book Sapiens, âIs there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods [us] who don’t know what they want?â To that, there is conspicuously little secular humanist response, and Philip Kitcher, author of Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism, himself admits that âEnlightened secularism has not yet succeeded in finding surrogates for institutions and ideas that religious traditions have honed over centuries or millennia.â As English philosopher Iris Murdoch noted over fifty years ago, âOur vision of ourselves has become too grand. We have isolated and identified ourselves with an unrealistic conception of the will, and we have no adequate conception of original sin.â Ultimately, the secular humanist conception of what a human being really is utterly deficient. Beyond being logically incoherent, monstrously ungrateful, and historically illiterate, it alsoâby its own admissionâfails to account for the undeniable fact that as often as human beings have the opportunity to do good, we chooseâwe chooseâto do bad.
Helpfully, there is one conception of human beings that accounts for this.
We Are Godâs Masterpiece
At bottom, the Christian conception of what it means to be a human being comes down to two things. Firstly, we are made in Godâs imageâwe are His masterpiece. Secondly, we are born in sin and shaped in iniquity. Together, these two realities form the basis for the Christian belief that, as Protestant Pope-equivalent Timothy Keller has well said, âWeâre far worse than we ever imagined, and far more loved than we could ever dream.â For some, this understanding of humanity is everything. It binds up their wounds, gives them real hope, and sets them free. However, for others, assenting to the Christian account of what it means to be a human being brings undue difficulty.
Towards the end of George Bernard Shawâs play Pygmalion (later made into the movie-musical My Fair Lady), Elizaâs father, Alfie Doolittle bemoans the fact that through no fault of his own and without his consent, he was lifted from the streets and turned into a middle class man: âItâs making a gentleman of me that I object to. Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free.â For Alfie, being made into a gentleman curtailed his liberties, and there are many who look at Christianity and feel it to be similarly encumbering. Who asked you to make a masterpiece of me? I was happy. I was free. If we are, in fact, Godâs masterpieceâshaped by and made in the image of the one and only Deityâthat means we have to take ourselves seriously. We can treat neither our lives nor our actions, however small, with any form of flippancy. In a word, we have responsibilities.
In a letter to jailbird Perry Smith reprinted in Truman Capoteâs true crime novel In Cold Blood, Perryâs sister tells him, âAs far as responsibility goes, no one really wants it.â Sheâs entirely correct. Responsibility is exhausting, and the idea that it would be foisted upon us from the get, without God even asking us whether or not we wanted it, makes many upset. This is especially true when discussions of ultimate judgment are brought in because, in the words of Dr. Jerry Coyne, âThe combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic.â To him, the assertion that human beings not only have inescapable responsibilities but that we are also under divine accounting and authority is revolting. And he isnât alone.
Writing on what he terms the âcosmic authority problem,â something he personally sees as directly âresponsible for much of the scientism and reduction of our time,â NYU Professor Emeritus Thomas Nagel said this about his own anti-theistic (particularly anti-Christian) proclivities:
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isnât just that I donât believe in God and, naturally, hope that Iâm right in my belief. Itâs that I hope there is no God! I donât want there to be a God; I donât want the universe to be like that.
For Nagel, Coyne, and countless others besides, the Christian conception of human beings (alongside its broader cosmic scheme) is supremely unappealing. They do not want to be Godâs masterpiece. Better to be beasts, meat machines, illusory, fleeting, or the measure of all things than to be subject to the commands and castigations of some deadweight Deity. Heâs a party-pooper, really. And life is short. Better to live it with âall of the joys and none of the duesâ and any discussion of divine judgment far, FAR off in another room. However, there are others who object to Christianityâs view, not because they feel Godâs expectations are onerous or else several orders too tall but because they feel that they, themselves, are far too small.
Speaking at a gathering of the American Humanist Association, Bill Nye the Science Guy informed his tittering audience,
Iâm insignificant⊠I am just another speck of sand. And the Earth, in the cosmic scheme of things, is another speck. And the sun is an unremarkable star. Nothing special about the sun. The sun is another speck. And the galaxy is a speck. Iâm a speck, on a speck, orbiting a speck, among other specks, among still other specks in the middle of specklessness! I suck!
Writing about how astronomical observations have informed his perception of the world and humanity at large, the late particle physicist Victor Stenger asserted, âThe earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on the beach.â Ironically, in affirming their own (and everyone elseâs) speckiness, Nye and Stegner are in good and faithful company. In Psalm 8:3-4, King David, widely regarded as one of the godliest men in the Bible, marvels at the relative smallness of humanity: âWhen I consider the Heavens, the moon and the stars, the works which Thy hand hath made, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?â
What is man that Thou art mindful of him?
In an excerpt from his book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, science writer Bill Bryson describes man, not by looking towards the heavens but by looking within:
If you laid all the DNA in your body end to end it would stretch ten billion miles, beyond the orbit of Pluto: âThink of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are, in the most literal sense, cosmic.â
In their book God and Galileo: What a 400-Year-Old Letter Teaches Us about Faith and Science, astronomers (and committed Christians) David Block and Kenneth C. Freeman encourage their readers to not only look up but to look back. Two-thousand years ago to be exact:
The incarnation resounds with a central message of purpose. Mankind is special enough that the Creator of this universe visited this world in person out of His love for fallen mankind and died for us.
That may seem fanciful or fantastic, but as Christian and author of the global phenomenon, A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine LâEngle has well said, that does not mean it isnât accurate:
The whole idea of the Incarnation is hilarious! That God should so love us? We are weird! But that God should so love this weird part of this whoopsie creation that God Himself would come and be part of us to show us what it’s like to be humanâwhat being human is meant to be.
On the Christian understanding, Jesus Christâs incarnationâHis life and deathâsaid two things: This is who I am. This is what you mean to Me.
Commenting on the split between the focus of scientific and religious inquiry, atheist and anthropologist Scott Atran has said, âScience treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central.â Indeed, according to Christianity, it was for human beingsâGodâs masterpieceâthat God, Himself, gave up everything.
So what is a human being, really? A beast, a meat machine, illusory, fleeting, the measure of all things? Iâve done my best to offer a survey of the most prevalent perspectives and have given, when I feel it due, a âChristian kickingâ to some of the more pernicious views, but ultimately, the question of what it really means to be a human being is still under review. I personally think the claim of Christianity, that we are Godâs masterpiece, is true, and for me, it is far and away the most satisfying, comprehensive, and real worldview.
âSo how can you tell what your life is worth or where your value lies? You can never see through the eyes of man. You must look at your life. Look at your life through Heavenâs eyes.â
Religion & Science Spring 2022
