Humans Are Special — Just Not That Special

2010.02.23   prev     next

Michael Ruse in the Boston Globe:

But of course humans are special, and much better than the rest of the living world. We can do algebra, we can appreciate complex music, we can carry on complex conversations and write complex messages (like the one you’re reading here), we can create iPhones, build spaceships, and the upper limit of what we are capable isn’t even in sight. Imagine a bear doing any of those things (or many, many others), and it’s painfully obvious how special humans are.

But we’re not special in the religious sense. We’re not “moral” beings, or uniquely endowed with “souls,” subject to “final judgment,” or any of that stuff.

Turns out, most religious don’t like the specialness of humans any more than Ruse does. The idea that what separates us from hippos is, for example, our ability to do algebra, or to communicate with other humans via complex sentences, is, to most religious, very offensive. They want to believe that those things are irrelevant, and only spiritual differences matter.

The logic of both sides can be summed up this way:

• Darwinists — All human capabilities are just a serendipitous byproduct of mutation-selection evolution honing organisms for survival and reproduction. If we’re not any more likely to survive the next 10,000 years than are bacteria or ants, then we’re no better than bacteria or ants. Evolution doesn’t know or care about anything but the ability to survive.

• Religious — All human capabilities are just material, worldly factors that have nothing to do with our relationship to our creator God, who cares only about our love for him and his commandments, and our desire to get into heaven after we die. God probably doesn’t care whether or not humanity survives the next 10,000 years — only about the state of mind of humans when they die.

The manifest evidence that humans are very special compared to all other life on Earth leads to a conclusion that neither the Darwinists nor the religious want to acknowledge — a conclusion that both of those groups use contorted rationalization to avoid.

The obvious conclusion is that we were intentionally created to dominate and control our planet, then to escape in spaceships and spread out across this universe. And to have a pretty good time doing it.