I read a book review during the week about what it means that we share 98 per cent of our DNA with apes. Are we just bigger badder animals? Are we fundamentally different? And what does it do for our ethics? These are questions that confront us all the time. Should the courts in Western Australia have ruled that a paralyzed man has the right to starve himself to death? Should the Australian parliament pass laws totally re-defining marriage to allow homosexual marriage in our country?

Over the next few weeks I want to post some sections from an old Briefing article by Peter Jensen on what it means to be human. This week's section is a little long, but I felt it would do too much damage not to post it in full. The coming weeks will be shorter. I hope that it will stimulate us to keep thinking biblically about what it means to be human.

What is man? Throughout history great minds have tried to define us as a species, but the essence of humanity has proved hard to pin down. “Man is a featherless biped”, Plato concluded, although he was somewhat dissatisfied with this as a definition. “Man is a reasoning animal”, wrote Seneca, echoing Aristotle. “Man is a tool using animal”, said Carlyle, anticipating modern anthropology. Man is “a poor, bare, forked animal”, wrote Shakespeare in his habitual pessimism about humanity.

So what have we? Man is an animal, at least; the dictionary definition of animal is “Any living thing that is not a plant, generally capable of voluntary motion, sensation etc”, which undoubtedly includes us. But are we mere animals? One answer with a long pedigree is that we are superior animals. Sophocles considered: “There are many wonderful things in nature, but the most wonderful of all is man”. Today the tendency is to emphasise the animal connection rather than any superiority. We are regarded as the products of chance in a world empty of God, not created by the one true God but created by nature. In today's eyes, we are animals and no more, in the same category as the rest of the animal kingdom, in principle no more important than koalas or cockroaches.

Let's consider some of the potential consequences of saying that we are simply animals, the chance product of unthinking nature.

Three false routes

We could say that we are gods

The idea that we are simply animals arises from the idea that the world is empty of the God of the Bible. Usually it is associated with the philosophy of naturalism, that nature is all there is, and that natural forces create everything. That being so, since we are clearly, and far and away, the most powerful of the animals, we may as well recognise ourselves to be the Lords of the world and rule over it. Why not? We merely take by right what we have by might. As the English poet, Swinburne, said, “Glory to Man in the highest! For Man is the master of things”.

This is what we see in practice—if not always in philosophy—in the modern world. Contemporary people act as though they have found themselves in a grand but empty mansion. The owner is apparently absent, or there is no owner at all, and this mansion just appeared out of nothing. We move in, take possession and act as if we own it. We make up the rules of who will be here with us, who won't be, and who will use what room, and we enjoy all the benefits. We create our own world of meaning though the human mind. We make ourselves god-like creators. We have autonomy, in the literal sense: auto meaning self, and nomos meaning law. That is, we are self-legislating.

Think what this does to our behaviour.

Once we see that our moral beliefs are simply an adaptation put in place by natural selection, in order to further our reproductive ends, that is the end of it. Morality is no more than a collective illusion fobbed off on us by our genes for reproductive ends. (M. Ruse).

But so what? We are modified monkeys, and pretty powerful ones at that, so let's live like gods. Who's going to stop us?

We could say that we are feral animals

But we could look at our state in a far more negative way. Maybe we are just animals, and what is more, destructive, unnecessary animals. Maybe we are like the introduced species in Australia which have ‘gone feral’ and destroyed the native habitat. Deer, for instance, often need to be culled by the rangers in our national parks. This often causes public outcry, because they're such gentle and beautiful creatures. They may look wonderful and make us feel good, but they were never designed to roam around the Australian bush. They do extensive harm and make life difficult for the native animals. They have to go. The same discussion takes place over rabbits, foxes and cats—they are all introduced predators making inroads into the landscape. But if we're talking about predators that destroy landscapes, there can be no more destructive species than human beings.

In that sense, we are no better than feral animals, and we should be treated as such. We should be brought under control and our numbers kept down. One convenient way of doing this is to abort children, as that does not hurt anyone, or at the most another animal. We should make birth control compulsory. We lobby our own governments to fence off bits of nature so we can't go in there and do harm. We're not the rulers of nature, green groups constantly tell us; we're the scourge of nature, and we need to be kept under control.

We could say that we are cheap

This follows from the previous view, and is all too prevalent. The fact of the matter is that there are too many of us—about 6 billion in all. Bengal tigers, on the other hand, are very scarce. The tiger is worth preserving and deserves our best efforts; there are not many left in the world. But human beings are easy to replace and expensive to keep. Destroying an infant Bengal tiger is a crime, under the CITES convention—but destroying an infant human, well, that's just a woman's right. Certainly if you have to choose between a deformed infant and a Bengal tiger, choose the tiger.

In this view, we are only here by chance and it is absurd to think that we deserve special efforts to keep us alive. It is better to consider the matter pragmatically and attribute value by some more sensible criteria. As ethicist Peter Singer says, “We should reject the doctrine that places the lives of members of our species above the lives of members of other species”. It's not difficult to see that there might be those humans we could well do without—the young, the elderly, and the unfit. Perhaps we could begin to doubt that we all belong to the same species. Perhaps some are not truly human.

The consequences

Our traditional Christian view competes directly with such ideas about human beings. Either we are simply animals created by blind nature, ‘modified monkeys’, or we are the special creation of a good God. These competing views will have massive consequences in all sorts of areas: in education (what does the teacher of your child think about human beings?); in law; in medicine, in counselling; in business; in nursing homes; in race relations; in politics; in sexual matters—the list covers every human activity.

For much of the history of Australia we have had a broadly Christian approach to such matters. From about the 1960s onward, however, there has been a deliberate turning away from God here in Australia and the rest of the world, and a growing ignorance of his word. We can no longer take for granted a consensus of what it is to be human, and an ethic which goes with that. Our hospitals used to have that consensus. Even if people weren't actually Christians, they agreed with the Christian consensus on the value of life and so on.

This decline in knowledge of God's word, and decline in adherence to it, means that Christians must now think hard about what they believe about humanity, for society is no longer saying basically the same thing. We have to learn the Christian truth deliberately, and then learn how it applies to the world around us. Part of our witness to the gospel is a capacity to put forward the Christian view of human beings and its implications. Only then can we enter the struggle against de-humanising forces and ideologies that are flooding into the spiritual vacuum caused by our rejection of God.

I believe that God's word has the truth of the matter, and that it will be found to work in experience. I believe that we would have a happier, healthier, safer society, if we followed God's teaching. It would still be far from perfect, thanks to the continuing impact of sin, but it would be an improvement.

So what is God's teaching about who we are as humans?

(Read the full article online.)

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