The Modern Dichotomy In The Human Being

In the last couple of decades of human history, there has been an explosion of movements attempting to remedy the injustices perpetrated against all kinds of peoples believed to be inferior. These crusaders held to the idea that human beings--regardless of race, gender, mental capacity, or religion--are all entitled to the same rights (called “human rights”) simply because they enjoy the privilege of existing. More recently, we have seen in the news that this war rages on. With the massacre of Christians beyond our borders and the murders of black youth in our own country, we know that the fight for human rights is far from over.

And fight on we should. Protecting the sanctity of all human life by standing up for the oppressed in the face of adversity is one of the basic tenets that comes with being a Christ-follower. If we believe God created human beings in His image and have inherent objective rights over all other things, then any offense against ourselves and, in turn, our Creator should be met with vehement opposition. But what puzzles me is a contrary idea about humanity also perpetuated by modern society, and that is the belief of man is purely chemistry and biology; that a human is no more than a somewhat rational animal, whose knowledge is illusory and existence, if he or she should call it that, is no more than a functioning mass of amalgamated atoms. Now, we are animals, and I don’t strive to deny that. It would be preposterous to assert I am a member of a race of supernatural entities floating about, made of some transcendental substance, since my every breath would be actively refuting that claim. No, we are subject to the same pleasures and torments of this reality as every other living thing on Earth, but that’s where it stops. Where the biological stops, the philosophical and the spiritual pick up.

My immediate reaction to the naturalist’s philosophy is to wonder if anyone actually believes it. If someone told you she wholeheartedly believes her existence is fictitious, you should respond with, “Who’s talking to me?” I would think a man would be very upset if he came to me in a moment of desperate crisis and I told him, “I’m sorry, but you’re simply a phonating mass of matter; therefore, you’re feelings are insignificant.” The entirety of human psychology is deemed irrelevant and the course of human history would have happened in spite of itself, for as G.K. Chesterton pointed out man’s existence is not purely “economical.” If it were, there would be no annals of human history shaped by its own free will but merely a short story about eating and reproducing, like goats or cows grazing in meadows.

For the argument’s sake, let’s assume people do believe existence is futile. Then what? The entire human struggle has been in vain. There is no origin and there is no point of arrival. What gives us any rights, then, or even any objective moral framework? Ourselves? History has shown we aren’t very good at that. We will all simply go about our own lives doing our own senseless things, perhaps having a few wars and battling for some invention of truth, until some cataclysmic event, either by some external phenomenon or by our own hand, causes our inevitable mass extinction. And who is to blame? The course of all evolutionary nature. In its indiscretion, evolution somehow found it favorable to make us thinking animals painfully aware of our own existence who, in a strange and possibly self-destructive moment of our primal youth, instinctively pointed to the heavens for guidance and purpose. If this is true, this was a vicious thing for nature to have accidentally concocted.

I would maintain this kind of bleak existentialist philosophy to be an absurd one and, on close examination, does not account for the overwhelmingly contrary ideology represented by the majority of mankind evidenced throughout its history. It is impossible to cling to modern science’s interpretation of the human being and maintain that our race is under the law of objective rights, privileges, and punishments. The dichotomy is irrational and counterintuitive.

Perhaps we should start giving credence to the idea that humans are truly more than the sum of their parts. We contain within us the image of something more everlasting and are equipped with an innate purpose to attempt to realize that image. That image is, of course, the majesty of God. And should that be too difficult to grasp, reflect on the incarnation of Jesus Christ; that God fully took on the nature He had created--our bones, our skin, our DNA, our atoms--to visibly proclaim that He

is the everlasting image, the “I Am” our hearts yearn for. And when we do advocate for the basic rights of all image-bearers of God, what do we ultimately strive for? For light, peace, justice, charity, and love, all of these everlasting truths accomplished in the life and ministry of our Lord, Jesus Christ.