January Issue of The Worldview Bulletin-Pt. 1

The Image of God and Naturalistic Perspectives | The Two Books of Divine Revelation

Greetings, friends! In this issue of The Worldview Bulletin, Paul Copan looks at the relationship between the image of God and human rights, and contrasts this with a naturalistic perspective on which (in many cases) human rights find no foundation. Melissa Cain Travis explores the history and fruitfulness of the two-books metaphor for understanding the relationship between Scripture and the natural world. When properly interpreted, these will cohere rather than conflict. Paul Gould shares four reasons why it’s important to recognize the existence and nature of the soul, including the fact that it reveals who we are and shapes how we understand spiritual formation. David Baggett discusses some ways we’re responsible for the beliefs we hold, at least indirectly, and finds Bart Campolo’s claim that he had no control over his loss of belief in God dubious. We conclude with a number of links and resources of interest, along with deals on books that will nourish and fortify your soul.

For the King,

Christopher Reese

Editor-in-Chief

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Contents

Part One

1. The Imago Dei and Human Rights I:

   The Image of God and Naturalistic Perspectives

   by Paul Copan

2. The Two Books of Divine Revelation

   by Melissa Cain Travis

Please see the second email for Part Two of the newsletter.

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The Imago Dei and Human Rights I:

The Image of God and Naturalistic Perspectives

By Paul Copan

In our M.A. Philosophy of Religion program, I am currently teaching a course entitled “Ethical Theory.” In this course, we study “metaethics”—the status and justification of moral claims.[1] We also look at various ethical theories or schools such as utilitarianism, deontology/Kantianism, virtue ethics, social contractarianism, and so on, and try to understand these within the broader and richer explanatory outlook of Christian theism.

At present, we are considering questions related to the image of God, human rights, conscience, and so on. So I thought I would bring some of the discussion on this topic to our Worldview Bulletin readers.

Before we talk about human rights, we must understand what grounds or justifies “rights.” What could be the metaphysical basis of human rights? Of course, a key place to look is certain biblical affirmations of human dignity rooted in a supremely valuable Being:

Genesis 1:26-28: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

We could also explore Psalm 8 or James 3:9 and other such texts.  

However, what about a naturalistic perspective on human dignity or uniqueness? Emory University’s Frans de Waal doesn’t see much of a difference between these image-bearers and the creatures they are supposed to rule: humans are “animals not only in body but also in mind.” Science blogger P. Z. Myers goes even further: “we [humans] aren’t any more special to the universe than a sea slug.” And though Catholic biologist Kenneth Miller sees an element of truth in Henry Gee’s claim that there is “nothing special about being human, any more than there is anything special about being a guinea pig or a geranium,” Miller at least acknowledges some features of our humanity that evolution cannot explain: “But I’m still waiting for an evolutionary explanation of the thrilling beauty of a Mozart symphony or a James Joyce short story.” [2]

Notwithstanding the claims that humans are nothing more than animals, even naturalists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett acknowledge differences between us humans and other creatures. Even if Dawkins claims that humans are simply dancing to the music of their DNA in a universe of electrons and selfish genes, he admits this about humans: “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth… We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”[3]  But what is the basis of that uniqueness? What accounts for this gap?

Philosopher Daniel Dennett sees this too: “Like other animals, we have built-in desires to reproduce and to do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal…. But we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives. This fact makes us different.”[4] Even so, Dennett won’t go so far as to say that humans have distinctive rights. Following utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Dennett considers “human rights” to be “nonsense on stilts.”[5]

The strict naturalist has no room for human dignity or objective moral values. All reality is comprised of matter (metaphysics), and everything that happens is causally determined (etiology). Dennett even rejects the notion of consciousness, calling it an illusion. (Of course, one needs to be conscious in order to experience an illusion of consciousness!)[6]

By contrast, the broad naturalist will make room for human dignity, consciousness, beauty, moral duties, and more. But, as we’ll see later on, such a view borrows from the goods furnished by a theistic worldview.

As for Dennett, the rejection of human rights is, of course, deeply troubling. One thinks of the attempted Nazi extermination of Jews or the Ukrainian Holodomor, and we recoil in horror.  The late philosopher Mary Midgley rightly observed: “An ethical theory which, when consistently followed through, has iniquitous consequences is a bad theory and must be changed.”[7] We can be grateful that at least broad naturalists recognize the “iniquitous consequences” of strict naturalism. They recognize the fundamental reality of human dignity and the moral framework of the universe. And even a strict naturalist like Dennett admits humans are distinct from “other animals.”

In Worldview Bulletin posts to come, I’ll discuss more about the image of God, its connection to human rights, and atheistic attempts to justify them.

Notes

[1] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it this way: “Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.”

[2] All of these quotations are found in Kenneth Miller’s piece, “On ‘Darwinism,’” Scientific American, April 17, 2018: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/on-darwinism/. (ibid.). 

[3] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 200-201.

[4] Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), 4.

[5] Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 507.

[6] See atheist Thomas Nagel’s critique of Dennett’s view in “Is Consciousness an Illusion?” in the New York Review of Books (March 9, 2017): https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-dennett-evolution/.

[7] Mary Midgley, “Duties Concerning Islands,” in Environmental Ethics, ed. Robert Elliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 91.

— Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Learn more about Paul and his work at paulcopan.com.