When it comes to dinner party conversations, there’s an old trick which can turn an ordinarily nescient question into one of supreme profundity and significance. It’s called the “really?” 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. It’s an easy trick. You simply tack on “really?” 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. It’s 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 that’s 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 people’s everyday lives. In discussing them, there’s very little on the line. However, there is at least one topic of conversation that, should the “really?” trick be applied, it will doubtlessly enliven and very likely ruin the night because everyone is going to have an opinion, and they’ll 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, “Conflict 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.” And that conflict, in the words of Cornell University co-founder Andrew Dickson White, has been “a war continued longer—with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfare of Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon.” 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), they’ll be listening intently to the shouting match, because they’ll grasp that an answer to that question is of ultimate and personal importance to them. After all, The Dalai Lama himself has well said, “How 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.” 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: “Man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits.” In the century and a half since, Darwin’s conception of man as simply the latest phase in the evolutionary chain has become an article of “secular faith,” and, in light of this, per University of Chicago Paleontologist Neil Shubin, it is widely believed that “We [humans] are not exceptional to any great degree. We’re just a twig on a giant evolutionary tree that includes everything.” Agreeing with Shubin, yet another UChicago professor, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, has said that thanks to Darwin, human beings have been “dethroned” from nature’s 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: “We’re all animals fighting for scraps on the Serengeti. Some of us just have bigger teeth.” 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, “ain’t nothin’ but mammals,” why then should we not “do it like they do on the Discovery Channel?” 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 Dawkins’ book River Out of Eden, he contends that human beings are basically, to use the words of MIT professor Marvin Minsky, “meat machines.” We are at the mercy of a “universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication” 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 ‘free will’—a linchpin of many faiths—now looks increasingly dubious as scientists not only untangle the influence of our genes and environments on our behavior, but also show that some ‘decisions’ can be predicted from brain scans several seconds before people are conscious of having made them. In other words, the notion of pure ‘free will,’ the idea that in any situation we can choose to behave in different ways, is vanishing. Most scientists and philosophers are now physical ‘determinists’ 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, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ 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. Frankl’s 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 weren’t 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.

Darrow’s 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. Lewis’ essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” he notes that this conceptual move, seemingly humane, turns a “person, a subject of rights” into “a mere object, a patient, a case.” 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. It’s 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. 

“But so what?” snaps the committed scientific materialist. “Those are the facts.”

“Are they, though?” The Dalai Lama asks. “Because last I checked, reality, including our own existence, is so much more complex.”

We Are Illusory

The Buddhist account of human beings offers an alternative to both materialists’ 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, “Come what may, no nasty reductionist or materialist will be in any position to say that consciousness is an illusion or that you don’t make choices.” 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 “the theory of emptiness,” holds that “from the perspective of the ultimate truth, things and events do not possess discrete, independent realities. Their ultimate ontological status is ‘empty’ in that nothing possesses any kind of essence or intrinsic being.” 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 Atwood’s 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 we’re 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 can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down. 

It’s as if we can’t 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 Netflix’s 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, it’s when she’s treated as if she does not exist by her little sister’s guardians that she finally loses it, crying, “What gives you the reason to treat me like I don’t exist? Because I exist! I exist!” It’s being treated like she does not that causes her anguish. 

“But don’t you see?” The Buddhist persists. “If she’d made peace with the reality of her inexistence and let go of all attachments, she’d be enlightened. She’d be free.” 

In the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Shawshank Redemption, Brooks Haten, a man who has spent fifty years in prison, is finally released. He’s given a place to stay, a job at the grocery, and of course, his liberty. And yet, he doesn’t like it. In correspondence to his friends, he describes himself as constantly afraid and out of place, writing, “I don’t like it here… I’ve decided not to stay.” He hangs himself the same day, letting go of all attachments—his friends, his place, his job, his very life—but 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, “BROOKS WAS HERE.” A Buddhist would say he’s mistaken. Brooks wasn’t there. “Brooks” wasn’t at all. Brooks was an illusion, and like all illusions, with time, they have to fall. 

If that makes us uncomfortable, it’s 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 we’re animals or just meat machines, is by and large moot. For them, the most defining characteristic of human beings is our awareness that we’re 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 can’t hope for there being any free will. There’s no hope whatsoever of there being any deep meaning in human life. We live. We die. And we’re gone! We’re 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, “There is, of course, no empirical evidence for either a soul or its unique presence in humans. It’s a superfluous religious add on.” We live. We die. And we’re 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, oblivion’s 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 we’re 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 “Does time lead inevitably to nothingness or does it flow into an eternity where all events can be remembered and reordered into an unfathomable beauty?” If the former, Jean-Paul Sarte was correct: “One dies one’s life. One lives one’s death.” 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. 

This second position has historically been found solely amongst religious adherents. However, during the last century, “enlightened secularism” 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 Creator’s image—we 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 don’t 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, “Life’s what [we] make it/ So let’s make it rock!” Or, to put it more soberly, according to Dr. Coyne, “‘Meaning and purpose’ are human constructs.” It’s up to us to make sure the world doesn’t go belly up. Furthermore, per Carl Coon (former US Ambassador to Nepal and winner of the American Humanist Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award), “We’re in charge. The future of life on this planet is in our hands.” That’s 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, we’ve 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 Shakespeare’s 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 humanism’s 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: “We are not monsters. We are members of the educated class. Our failure is one of imagination.” 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 Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino, playing Satan of all people, tells Keanu Reeves, “I’m a fan of man! I’m a humanist. Maybe the last humanist. Who in their right mind could possibly deny that the twentieth century was mine? All of it!” 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, “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods [us] who don’t know what they want?” 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 “Enlightened secularism has not yet succeeded in finding surrogates for institutions and ideas that religious traditions have honed over centuries or millennia.” As English philosopher Iris Murdoch noted over fifty years ago, “Our 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.” Ultimately, the secular humanist conception of what a human being really is utterly deficient. Beyond being logically incoherent, monstrously ungrateful, and historically illiterate, it also—by its own admission—fails to account for the undeniable fact that as often as human beings have the opportunity to do good, we choose—we choose—to do bad.  

Helpfully, there is one conception of human beings that accounts for this.

We Are God’s 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 God’s image—we 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, “We’re far worse than we ever imagined, and far more loved than we could ever dream.” 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 Shaw’s play Pygmalion (later made into the movie-musical My Fair Lady), Eliza’s 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: “It’s making a gentleman of me that I object to. Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free.” 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, God’s masterpiece—shaped by and made in the image of the one and only Deity—that 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 Capote’s true crime novel In Cold Blood, Perry’s sister tells him, “As far as responsibility goes, no one really wants it.” She’s 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,  “The combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic.” 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 isn’t alone.

Writing on what he terms the “cosmic authority problem,” something he personally sees as directly  “responsible for much of the scientism and reduction of our time,” 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 isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t 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 God’s 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. He’s a party-pooper, really. And life is short. Better to live it with “all of the joys and none of the dues” and any discussion of divine judgment far, FAR off in another room. However, there are others who object to Christianity’s view, not because they feel God’s 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,

I’m 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. I’m 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, “The earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on the beach.” Ironically, in affirming their own (and everyone else’s) 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: “When 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?” 

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: ‘Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are, in the most literal sense, cosmic.’ 

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 L’Engle has well said, that does not mean it isn’t 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 human—what being human is meant to be.

On the Christian understanding, Jesus Christ’s incarnation—His life and death—said 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, “Science treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central.” Indeed, according to Christianity, it was for human beings—God’s masterpiece—that God, Himself, gave up everything.

So what is a human being, really? A beast, a meat machine, illusory, fleeting, the measure of all things? I’ve done my best to offer a survey of the most prevalent perspectives and have given, when I feel it due, a “Christian kicking” 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 God’s masterpiece, is true, and for me, it is far and away the most satisfying, comprehensive, and real worldview. 

“So 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 Heaven’s eyes.”

Religion & Science Spring 2022