Recycled humans
Are we meaningless specks of dust in an uncaring universe? Or are we of infinite
value?
by Elizabeth East
‘Yes, that’s all we are’, said a l4-year-old girl during a science
lesson. ‘Just atoms and molecules that are recycled through nature and reused,
time and time again. Some of what I’m made of may once have been part of an
Egyptian pharaoh. And when I die I will rot or burn and some of me may find its
way into a cow or a tree, or even another human being.’
‘But what about your spirit?’ asked the teacher. ‘There’s
more to you than your body.’
‘No’, replied the girl. ‘There’s nothing more.’
The teacher had no answer. She could not logically add anything spiritual to an
explanation which said everything had a natural explanation. She had taught faithfully
within a system which relied on human ability and kept out the spiritual from its
very beginning. Starting with energy and matter it assumed that life evolved from
lifeless material through chance and natural selection, and this young girl had
drawn a logical conclusion. In this way of thinking she was no more than the lifeless
elements of her body.
There were other implications too, the teacher found as she gave the matter more
thought. If everything you do can be explained by natural hormones, electric
circuits and such like, it is nonsense to talk about a ‘mind of your own’.
Your mind is no more than the workings of your brain, controlled by its physics
and chemistry. There is no real ‘person’ who is ‘you’ directing
‘your’ thoughts and actions, only a collection of materials which must
act in a certain way given certain conditions. There is no ‘you’ to
be responsible for your actions. ‘You’ are only a tiny speck in an uncaring,
boundless universe, insignificant and of no importance. There is no reason for you
to be treated with respect, to be cared for in sickness, old age or adversity. Nor
is there a need to be considerate of others.
Yet everything people feel and experience causes them to insist, ‘This is
not so! We are real people! What we do and say is important!’
Furthermore, the teacher began to realize, in this system, where cruelty, disease
and death have played a major part in the evolution of living things, nature has
always been ‘cruel’. So, logically speaking, nothing can or should be
done to change it.
Why then do human beings develop laws to prevent one person harming another? Why
do they care for the sick and comfort the dying? Natural explanations can give no
answer.
The Judeo-Christian revelation has always told us we are real persons of infinite
value. Certainly we have a body, made from the dust of the earth, and that
body returns to the earth when we die. But this is not all we are, for we have been
made in the image of a personal God who is spirit. We are body and spirit.
Though this image has been spoiled by disobedience, it has not been destroyed. What
we do and say does make a difference, and we are responsible for our actions.
But we are also told that God has made a way for us to become the people we were
intended to be through His Son, Jesus Christ.
God has told us that cruelty, disease and death have no part in Himself. Nor were
they part of His original creation. They are the consequences of a moral decision
made by human beings, and will have an end. We are to fight them in every way possible.
Such a revelation leads to a logical system of thinking and agrees with human experience.
It seems strange that it should be rejected for faith in a system developed by human
ability which contradicts that experience, one in which life is meaningless, humanity
of no importance, and cruelty, disease and death the norm.
Rather than accept the Christian answer, some have turned to the religions of the
East which accept the hopelessness inherent in the evolutionary way of thinking.
In their view, it is wrong to think of ourselves as real persons, separate and distinct
from everything else. They seek to lose their individuality and become one with
nature and the universe, to be recycled (reincarnated) until ultimately they are
absorbed into the nothingness they say is behind everything.
There are those who say, ‘Why bother being logical? Let’s keep our theory
of evolution up to the point it tells us we are non-persons and valueless. Let’s
take a leap of faith and declare ourselves to be real parsons of great value.’
Some bring in God and the human spirit at this point, as the teacher tried to do.
But, as the student pointed out, you can’t bring in the spiritual when you’ve
insisted on natural explanations. Those who do so are no longer being rational.
Others say, ‘Let’s suppose the atoms and molecules which everything
is made from are alive—that they have feelings and emotions and a will of
their own. As things evolve and get more complicated they become more alive, more
able to choose what to do. This explains life, and freedom to choose, and is a natural
explanation.’ It also means that all those things we think of as having no
life, like rocks and water, are actually alive, and must be treated as such. In
this case, human beings are on an equal footing with the animals, the plants and
the environment. They have no intrinsic value. Everything and everyone is recycled,
including life. All is reabsorbed into the eternal ‘wheel’.
Some say this ‘life’ is God, woven into the very fabric of things, a
part of nature (pantheism). Others declare nature (including humans) to be only
part of this god (panentheism). Both are similar to the Eastern religions.
The ultimate questions are these: ‘Are we meaningless specks of dust in an
uncaring universe as the evolutionary theories tell us? Or are we of infinite value,
making choices which matter? How do we know which way of thinking is correct?’
All thinking begins with faith and is influenced by that faith.
Faith in human ability alone has no way of knowing. As Marjorie Grene says:
‘Our most luminous certainties are grounded in the certainty that they are
guesswork.’1
Such are the evolutionary theories and their implications.
But faith in the one true God who is there and has told us the truth about ourselves
and our world, beginning in Genesis, leads to an understanding which agrees with
our experience. We do not guess when we say that behind everything is a personal,
loving God, that we are more than the materials of which our bodies are made, and
that what we are and do is important.
Elizabeth East, B.Sc., Dip.Ed., taught science
and biology in high schools in Australia, and is now retired. Her book, Which Way?,
uses everyday language to show the bankruptcy of humanistic thinking and how the
only way of knowing is through the revelation in the Bible of the God who is there
and has spoken. Return to top.
Reference
- Marjorie Grene, The Knower and the Known, Faber & Faber Ltd, London,
p. 33, 1966.
|
