Uniquely Unique | What Does It Mean To Be Human?

Stump:

So… how do we get started here? 

Hoogerwerf:

Yeah, that’s a good question. We’ve got a lot to cover. I guess we could start by saying…can I say this? This is Language of God. 

Stump: 

And who are you? 

Hoogerwerf: 

I’m Colin Hoogerwerf, the producer of the show. 

Stump: 

And I’m Jim Stump. Usually your host, but we’re doing something a little bit different here. This is the first episode in a mini series we’re calling Uniquely Unique. And for the next 6 episodes, Colin is pulling up a chair to join me in talking about this journey we’ve been on. Is it a journey?

Hoogerwerf: 

How about a quest?

Stump: 

Ooo… sounds like we could encounter dragons.

Hoogerwerf: 

Or maybe chase some windmills? Either way, this quest has brought us all over the place. Back in time to a couple of hundred thousand years ago and also into the future. Into the workings of our brain and to some darker places as well. But here in this first episode we want to talk about the main question we’re going to be asking, which is What Does it Mean to Be Human? 

Stump: 

For many of us who accept both the contemporary science of evolution and the historical Christian faith, we humans are a bit of an enigma. From the science itself, we see so much continuity between ourselves and the rest of life on the planet, but we also see a radically different way of life than anything else has.

Hoogerwerf: 

Right, and then bring in theology and see that human beings were created for a special purpose in the created order, but also that we have messed that up, that we are fallen and in need of redemption. It didn’t take evolution to prompt the Psalmist to say 3000 years ago: “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Ps. 8).

Stump: 

There’s that question again. 

Various Voices: 

What does it mean to be human?

Stump: 

Over the past several months Colin and I have been exploring this question, going on this quest, by asking a bunch of experts in a lot of different fields what it means to be human. We’ll be bringing their voices in throughout the series. If you journey with us, you’ll see the answers are not always entirely straightforward. Sometimes they only bring more questions as we uncover conflicting intuitions about just how special or unique we are, and how different disciplinary perspectives sometimes point us in different directions.

Hoogerwerf: 

Right. There are a lot of different ways you can begin to answer this question and some of those answers will be the main topics of the next several episodes, where we’ll look specifically at some of the traits that seem like obvious contenders for what makes us human, things like the human brain or the advanced technology we have created. But today we’re going to spend more time on the question itself—what does it mean to be human—because it may not be entirely clear what we’re asking or what sort of answer would ultimately satisfy us.

Stump: 

Yeah, to start digging in, let’s bring in our first expert. Jeff Schloss is a biology professor at Westmont College and has about as wide of knowledge about these issues as anyone I know. We’ll bring his voice in several times throughout the series.   

Schloss: 

Interestingly, the question ‘what does it mean to be human,’ itself has to be unpacked for what the question itself means, because I think in current thinking, it means two different but not mutually antagonistic things. One is, well, what’s our definition or criteria by which we ascribe human-ness? So we can ask it in terms of what qualities make humans human. But the second and more difficult, but more profound question is, well, what is the meaning or purpose to which we ascribe to human life?

Stump: 

So it turns out that our question, what does it mean to be human, might actually be two different questions. The first one is to ask what is it that distinguishes us from other things. 

Hoogerwerf: 

This is kind of like defining our terms, right? We have to know what a human is before we can know what it means to be one?

Stump: 

Right. And we can ask this of about anything. We might ask “what does it mean to be a carbon atom?” and we’d say, “well, it’s got to have six protons” That’s one of the criteria for being carbon. That distinguishes carbon from other elements. But I’m not so sure Jeff’s second way of understanding the question applies to carbon atoms: what is the meaning or purpose of carbon atoms?

Hoogerwerf: 

So that already makes us think there is something different about humans, since we can ask the meaning question about us.

Stump: 

Could be. We’ll have to hold onto that thought. But notice, too, that trying to answer these two different questions might pull us in different directions and we’ll need different tools and disciplines to address them.

Hoogerwerf: 

So we also talked to David Lahti about this, and he also distinguished two ways of addressing the question of what it means to be human. 

Stump: 

David also has wide-ranging interests in this question, and has PhDs in both biology and philosophy.

Hoogerwerf: 

And he’s been on the podcast before, back on episode 60 where you had a full conversation with him. But then we talked to him again specifically about our question, ‘what does it mean to be human?’ Here’s what he said:

Lahti: 

In terms of going about answering that question, biology and theology have diverged in several ways in their terminology and methods and focus over the years, especially with the rise of modern science. And so we increasingly have to look at humans from two different directions, sort of like a bottom up or earth-up direction, and then a top-down or heavens-down direction. And so those of us who actually study humans, from a scientific perspective, this can almost seem a little schizophrenic at times. Because, you know, on a day to day basis, we’re studying humans, from the earth-up direction, what we are as an organism, how we got here, what makes us interesting and different from other things that have come up from the dirt, sort of our existence as humans. And there is really no essence. Whereas from a heavens-down perspective, or sort of a theological perspective, or metaphysical perspective, what are we for? Or why are we here? Where are we going? The Ionian thinkers’ questions. And that’s a far older question. And it’s, in a sense, related to the essence of what it means to be human. And I find that when we investigate in these two directions, the two perspectives meet in the middle in some really interesting ways

Hoogerwerf: 

So I like the way he puts that. So let’s stick with this first part for a little bit. Earth up. How do we distinguish humans from other things? If we go outside, or say we go to the zoo, and you pointed at something, I could tell you whether it was a human with about 100% confidence. Humans are the ones that walk on two legs, communicate with language, wear clothes, and tap on the glass barriers at the tiger exhibit to try to make the animals move. And they’re also the ones who write books and send rockets to Mars and produce esoteric podcast series about what humans are. All of these things (and a lot more) distinguish us from everything else. But I bet it gets more complicated than that, doesn’t it?

Stump:

Yeah, we’re going to have to define some terms here. We’ve been asking about humans. But the scientific term for our species, the one that earth-up researchers use is actually Homo sapiens. So when we’re at the zoo, you’re right, the distinguishing task is pretty easy. And everything you identify as human is also going to be classified also as Homo sapiens. Those two categories are concordant…each group is going to have exactly the same individuals. But wind back the clock, we’re going to start having some problems. If we go back 100,000 years, say, Homo sapiens are living alongside Neanderthals and other species in the Homo genus and if you went to the zoo then, there’s going to be a lot more gray area. So we might say, “that one looking at the otter, she’s a human; and I’m pretty sure that guy at the monkey exhibit isn’t. But I don’t know what to say about that group watching the antelope. Maybe they’re human?”

Hoogerwerf: 

Ok, so we have these species names. Homo sapiens is a category that was determined by people—not so long ago really. There are real characteristics that we can look at and say, this thing fits and this thing doesn’t. Can science sort out the difference between human and Homo sapiens?

Stump: 

Let’s go back to Jeff Schloss.

Schloss: 

I think science has to have a voice, but it doesn’t have a despotic rule here. There’s a lot of discussion even within the sciences about the extent to which the designation of human is concordant with any particular species designation. So, some people argue that Homo sapiens are humans and the only humans and others extended it to—even with the biological species concept, we may talk about that later in terms of groups that can interbreed—they extend it to Homo neanderthalensis. Others still extended to all beings in the Homo genus. So science has input. I’m not sure that science can make the ultimate determination. There are other academic disciplines, sociology for example, and philosophy that can help. My own view is that we also need theology. We need here to access for those who believe in a God who created human beings and created them with certain ends in mind, well we might want to hear from him about what is fundamental to human flourishing.

Stump: 

Let’s introduce one more expert here. Helen De Cruz is originally from Belgium, now teaches philosophy at St. Louis University, but also has a second PhD in archeology and art sciences.

Hoogerwerf: 

I’m starting to get the impression that it helps to have a wide range of education to address this question.

Stump: 

It certainly doesn’t hurt!

De Cruz: 

I think the question of what it means to be human—there isn’t a way in which you can give a sort of straightforward scientific answer, because the whole concept of a species is in part philosophical. So if you think about, for instance, Linnaeus in the 18th century, did a lot of things about you know, so he defined what a species is, and his idea was sort of species are certain, they have certain clusters of characteristics that make them a species, for example, Homo sapiens is a mammal and you know, walks upright, and so on. But at the same time, you then get into difficulty with the question of what a species is, if you look at the archaeological record, like where do you make the line? Where do you draw the line between, you know, these are human, and these are not human. Like, for example, was Lucy, the Australopithecine, who lived about 3 million years ago, was she human? So that’s a philosophical question. 

Hoogerwerf: 

We’ll get back to Linnaeus and the concept of what a species is in just a minute, but first let’s understand better what we might be including when we say the word human because it becomes obvious that it’s not the same as Homo sapiens. 

Stump: 

Helen describes a spectrum within the scientific community. At one end of the spectrum, they will say that anything on our ancestral line after the evolutionary split leading to humans and chimpanzees could be called human. Robert Foley holds this view and wrote about it in a book called Humans Before Humanity. 

De Cruz: 

But then you have at the other end of the spectrum, you have people like, like Ian Tattersall, who look at a narrower definition, and they’d like to see humans more restrained as anatomically belonging to the species Homo sapiens. And that’s an even more restrictive definition, having what we call cultural modernity or behavioral modernity. I tend to side with the sort of more inclusive definition of basically saying humanity is just, you know, everything after the split between humans and chimpanzees. But that’s the philosophical choice. I think that’s not an entirely like—  There isn’t the kind of scientific fact of the matter.

Hoogerwerf: 

Okay, hold on. There’s a lot to sort through here. I’ve got that “human” and “Homo sapiens” are different terms or categories and there’s some confusion about their relationship. What are the options? 

Stump: 

There are essentially three ways we could sort this out: you could say that humans and Homo sapiens are exactly the same. Second, you could say that Homo sapiens are a subset of humans; or third, that humans are a subset of Homo sapiens.

Hoogerwerf: 

Ok, let’s break these down because this is a little confusing. The first option is pretty easy. That’s the one where human and Homo sapien just means exactly the same thing.. So what about Homo sapiens as a subset of humans. So that means that human is the bigger category and that Homo sapiens are just one kind of human. What other kinds of humans would there be then?

Stump: 

Well Helen said some people want to go all the way back to everything since our common ancestors with chimpanzees. That’s seven to ten million years ago and would include creatures who were just beginning to walk upright, didn’t have language, probably didn’t control fire or use many other tools. 

Hoogerwerf: 

That doesn’t seem very human-like. 

Stump: 

No, so I think most people want to restrict humans at least to the genus Homo—which, by the way, is the Latin word for human.

Hoogerwerf: 

So then there would be Homo sapiens—our species—but also Homo neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals), Homo erectus, and several other species.

Stump: 

Yeah, now from both fossil records and DNA we’ve been able to reconstruct, scientists identify at least 11 different species in the genus Homo. And what’s really wild to think about is that 300,000 years ago, at least eight or nine of these were still around. 

Hoogerwerf: 

So the question is, “were they human, too?”

Stump: 

And different people will answer that in different ways, and it is not a purely scientific question, as Helen said.

Hoogerwerf: 

Okay so then what about the other way around where Homo sapiens is the bigger category and humans is the subset. So then there are some kinds of Homo sapiens that aren’t human?

Stump: 

Right, so we identify the beginning of Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago; that is the anatomically human stage. Their skeletons look just like ours today. But like Helen said, we identify sometime later when these Homo sapiens became “behaviorally modern”—when they started acting like we do.

De Cruz: 

Like you know you could teleport a person say from, you know, Blombos cave 70,000 years ago, or from Lascaux cave 18,000 years ago, put them here, and you know, you could raise them and they’d be just like us,  

Hoogerwerf: 

So she’s saying we could bring someone here from 70,000 years ago and we couldn’t tell the difference?

Stump: 

We’d probably want to take them to H&M, get them some clothes, and put the Duolingo app on their phones so they could learn English. But otherwise, yes.

Hoogerwerf: 

So people at the other end of the spectrum want to say only these behaviorally modern humans are really humans, and the rest of those Homo sapiens are something else. 

Stump: 

Yes, and when we bring theology into play, there are people who might restrict the category of human even further by saying only once God enters into a relationship with those Homo sapiens do they become truly human.

Hoogerwerf: 

Then you could have a situation where Homo sapiens have evolved in a group or groups, just the way modern science says, but then at some point God is revealed more fully to one group of these Homo sapiens, calls them to bear God’s image. And these are the true humans? Something like that?

Stump: 

Yes. But note again that science doesn’t really have anything to say about any of these scenarios. They are philosophical or theological decisions that have to be made..

Hoogerwerf: 

So human doesn’t necessarily mean Homo sapiens. Can we at least ask what does it mean to be a Homo sapiens? Have we arrived at the species problem?

Stump: 

Our favorite topic. 

Hoogerwerf: 

We’ve gotten into this a bit in some past episodes but you and I have talked about this a lot. Argued even?

Stump: 

Yeah, so you want to say that species are real things, as though you could bump into one somewhere.

Hoogerwerf: 

I don’t think I’d want to say it quite like that. But you want to say that species is a totally made up concept and has no bearing on reality. 

Stump: 

Also, probably not quite how I’d put it.

Hoogerwerf: 

Well let’s see if we can shed some light on whatever our disagreement is.

Stump: 

Linnaeus is probably a good place to start. He was a botanist and zoologist in the mid 1700s who came up with the idea of a hierarchical grouping of lifeforms by their similar characteristics. And although many of his original assignments have changed, the hierarchy is still in use today. Most of us learned about this in school: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.

Hoogerwerf: 

So Linnaeus looks around at the world he’s living in and he sees something—which I think to many people seems obvious—which is that there are groups of individuals which are the same as each other. And they knew this before Linnaeus, but what Linnaeus did was start to put names to all of them and a system to how they related to one another. That system has been refined and given all kinds of rules over the centuries since Linnaeus. And that system has, I think, really colored the way we see the world. I was taught the Latin names for trees when I was in school and so when I walk through the woods I’m trained to see leaf shape and bark texture so I can put a very specific name to each individual tree. That’s an Eastern Hemlock, Tsuga canadensis. There’s a dawn redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides. The system is really helpful for biologists. We need a common language to be able to communicate about the natural world.

Stump: 

But there are problems with the system. Here’s David again.  

Lahti: 

The species problem is one of a class of problems that arises anytime you try to take something that’s on a continuous process or scale and stick it into strict categories. So in the same way, we have a color problem or a calendar problem, or I like talking about the generation problem. When do you tell when Millennials end and Gen Z begins? Because births are a continuous stream of events through time, so even though you’re dealing with a real pattern, where you come down to split things in two is a bit arbitrary. 

Hoogerwerf: 

The definition of a species that most people are familiar with is the biological species concept, which focuses on the ability of individuals that can interbreed with others in a group. This concept works pretty well for a lot of animals we look at today, but it works less well for certain species which are undergoing evolutionary change and when you’re looking at something that reproduces asexually, like bacteria. 

Stump: 

And it gets really tricky when you start looking across time. So remember from math or logic class the transitive relation?

Hoogerwerf: 

Mmm. sounds like you’ve gone into professor mode. Want to give us a little refresher?

Stump: 

Okay. So there are lots of relationships that we claim to exist between two individuals. For example, I might say that I am taller than you.

Hoogerwerf: 

The audience will have to take your word for that, but ok, what’s your point? 

Stump: 

The point is whether that relationship is transitive—that is, can I transfer it to other individuals based on what we know about the relationship between us?

Hoogerwerf: 

So you’re taller than me; but Francis Collins is taller than you.

Stump: 

Right, so if those two things are true, we know with certainty and without having to put Francis and you back to back, that he is taller than you.

Hoogerwerf: 

So I guess I don’t get to hang out with Francis Collins. But the point you’re making is that “taller than” is a transitive relation.

Stump: 

Yes. Stated a little more formally, if A has a relation to B, and B has that same relation to C, then A has that same relation to C.

Hoogerwerf: 

But not all relationships are transitive?

Stump: 

No. For example, I’m the father of Casey, and Casey is the father of Fin. But I am not the father of Fin.

Hoogerwerf: 

So, “father of” is not a transitive relationship. So apply that back to species, now?

Stump: 

Okay. So just because A is the same species as B, and then we might say B is the same species as C, that’s not enough for us to conclude that A is the same species as C. Particularly as that chain of individuals grows longer and longer over many generations, the starting individual in that chain and the ending individual can be different species.

Hoogerwerf: 

We’d never say that parents are a different species than their offspring.

Stump: 

No, so we can’t really draw a line and say here is where they change from one species to another, because they are the same species as their immediate predecessors and successors. But over long periods of time you get something different. “Same species as” is not a transitive relation.

Hoogerwerf: 

I’ve heard this same idea explained with ring species. 

Lahti: 

That’s right. This is exactly the same issue that we have temporally. That, you know, there’s no way that we could interbreed with an organism a million years ago, even though we could have interbred between generations continuously along that trajectory. And so that happens spatially as well as temporally. 

Stump: 

Yes, tell the story of the salamanders 

Hoogerwerf: 

Ensatina escholtzii to be exact. The salamanders lived north of the Central Valley in California. Over time, they migrated south, some to one side of the Valley—toward the Pacific Coast—some to the other—further inland. And for ecological reasons, they can’t survive down in the valley itself, so it is a barrier to them. After a while you have the salamanders on the coast which start to adapt, changing color patterns and some on the other side of the valley also adapting to local conditions. Eventually both groups migrate all the way south to where the valleys end and they come back together. But when they come back together, the coastal salamanders and the inland salamanders can no longer breed with one another. But go back up each line and you see only gradual change back to the original population. These gradual changes, let’s call them changes in degree, happening on each side of the valley, start to pile up until you have a change in kind. 

Stump: 

A different species, even? 

Hoogerwerf: 

That’s the question. In the case of the salamanders, they are only called different subspecies according to biologists and the rules that govern when we rename a species. But the point is, that the rules we have developed for how to name species don’t map perfectly with how the world actually works. 

Lahti: 

We are trying to categorize things by imposing rules on the evolutionary process. And these rules are often broken in nature, and yet, we can’t break them, or our categories don’t work.

Hoogerwerf: 

So are species real?

Stump: 

Seems to me like they are categories we impose on the world. But I’m not saying we could impose them any way we want—there really is a world there that constrains us and our categories. We really can group more similar individuals together. It’s just that some of the lines we draw between the groups are arbitrary.

Hoogerwerf: 

I’ve always liked the color metaphor, which David brought up earlier. It’s easy for us to think about a change in color as a change in degree. We see this all the time in color gradients, where green slowly changes to blue, but at no point in the gradient can you see some place where it was green and then it is blue. So we can think about species like this a little bit. There are gradual changes, but with color, all the gaps are filled. There is always a way to blend one color into another. But with species that is not always the case. There is not going to be a series of creatures we can find today to make a perfect line between, say, a rabbit and a squirrel. Or between a human and a chimp. But over time, what we’re saying, is that that spectrum did exist. With color, just like with species, we have come up with boundaries, which are not always agreed upon. The most common argument in my household is with my wife about what colors things are. When we put sapphire next to cerulean, there are going to be arguments. But most of us will be in agreement when we put crimson next to sky blue. In that case, we have added up a bunch of degrees of changes and at some point, we say, no, those are more different. They are different kinds.

Stump: 

When we asked Jeff about this he brought up a good analogy that brings this discussion of species back to our original question of what it means to be human.

Schloss: 

Well at face value, the question makes sense, difference in degree or difference in kind? That binary, that dichotomy itself has problems. So there are situations where one particular species or one particular individual or one particular class is so different in degree that it warrants an ascription of difference in kind. So, you know, if all the plants in the world, all the woody plants in the world, were the size of rose bushes, and then we had redwood trees, I think most people would say that that’s a difference in kind. And some similar judgments have been, over the last decade or so, have been made with respect to human beings. So, for example, the evolutionary biologists Robert Boyd and Pete Richerson speak of humans as being evolutionary anomalies, or spectacular outliers. Now that the concept of outliers is really important, because to be an outlier, you have to have you have to be measuring some quality that is measurable. It fits on the same map but we’re so far off the grid, that it may merit an attribution of different in kind.

Hoogerwerf: 

When we ask the question, what does it mean to be human, we are, at least in part, asking the question, how are we different from other species. And this whole species problem seems to hint at the fact that maybe we’re not going to find our difference at the species level…

Stump: 

Since the whole idea of species is not a perfect concept. 

Hoogerwerf: 

[sigh] Right. Let’s take a break. 

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hey Language of God listeners. If you enjoy the conversations you hear on the podcast, we just wanted to let you know about our website, biologos.org, which has articles, videos, personal stories, and curated resources for pastors, students, and educators. And we’ve recently launched a new animated video series called insights. These short videos tell stories and explore many of the questions at the heart of the faith and science conversation. You can find them at biologos.org/insights or there’s a link in the shownotes. All right, back to the show!

Hoogerwerf: 

Well it’s pretty clear that we could spend a lot of time talking about the quirky nuances of this question. 

Stump: 

Yes, I’m afraid we’ve not resolved much, but only shown that asking what it means to be human brings with it a host of other questions.

Hoogerwerf: 

We could probably use a recap.

Stump: 

Ok, In reverse order of how we addressed them, we talked about species and how it’s really problematic to draw strict lines demarcating one species from another.

Hoogerwerf: 

And before that, we talked about the difference some people see between human and Homo sapiens—how Homo sapiens is a scientific concept, but human gets used differently by different people.

Stump: 

And what got us talking about that difference is the two legitimate ways of trying to answer this question, ‘what does it mean to be human’—one from the ground up, as it were, looking for the characteristics that distinguish us from other things, which is primarily a scientific way of going about it.

Hoogerwerf: 

So then there’s still another side of this that we haven’t explored, answering the question from the heavens-down as David Lahti called it.

Stump: 

Or what Jeff Schloss called the more profound and difficult way of answering the question.

Hoogerwerf:  

The first one seemed pretty difficult too. But I have a feeling science is going to be quieter on this next question. 

Stump: 

Yeah, so maybe this is a good place to bring in one more expert. So far we’ve heard from people in the fields of biology, philosophy and archeology. But when we look to the role and purpose of humans we’re not going to get much from those disciplines. Instead we need to hear from a theologian, to bring the heavens down to us. And for theologians when you ask what it means to be human, it doesn’t take long to start talking about the image of God.

Hoogerwerf: 

Andrew Torrance is a theologian from Scotland at the University of St. Andrews. 

Torrance: 

I think one of the dangers, when you’re thinking about what it means to be created an image of God is that we try, we look at human beings, and we think, what are the things that make us better than the rest of creation? And then we look at such things as autonomy, rationality, and we sort of elevate ourselves over creation. And we think that’s what makes us like God. And often we then try to define who God is according to that which distinguishes us from the rest of the creation. And so we think about who God is by elevating such concepts as knowledge or autonomy, or our sense of morality. And now this isn’t to say that God isn’t omniscient or the source of morality or these things. But very often what we do is we start with understanding what it means to be human and then we put these unto God. When I think what we really need to start out with is a story that God tells us about what creation is, about the meaning of creation. And on the basis of that think, what is our role within the story that we are given to know? And what we learn is that we are given a unique role to play. And that unique role is, I think, could be associated with our being defined as creatures that have been created in the image of God.

Hoogerwerf: 

So theology comes in and answers ‘what does it mean to be human’ by getting us to look not at what kinds of abilities we have, but the role we’ve been given. 

Stump: 

Right, when we look from the ground up, using science to try and learn about what we are, we can really only define humans by the traits or abilities that show up; because that’s all science sees. It misses the role that we are to be playing in the world.

Hoogerwerf: 

But we need those traits to play that role, right? There’s a question you have sometimes ask, and I think it’s kind of funny, but it gets at this issue, which is, could God have chosen cucumbers to bear the image of God? 

Stump: 

Right! I don’t think cucumbers could play that role. They don’t have the necessary abilities for that. And I think this shows what David told us earlier about the two ways of asking our question, meeting in the middle in some really interesting ways. Are the traits we learn about when we study humans from the ground up critical for the role that we are to play when we look from the heavens down? Is there some link between what we are as physical beings, the outcome of millions of years of evolution, to our role as stewards of creation made in the image of God?

Hoogerwerf: 

Those are some big questions and we’re not going to handle all of that in this episode. But this does set up a kind of roadmap for us, beginning with a deeper dive into the biology of us, following that into culture and technology and then eventually seeing the dark side of being human, which is that we humans are the only things that seem to have the capacity to actually threaten our own existence. So that’s a little teaser to where we’re going. But we won’t end there because the Christian perspective on this issue is one that ends in redemption. And so we’ll end, really exploring things from the heavens down and what it means to be made in the image of God. 

Stump: 

Before we leave this episode, though, we should point to one more aspect of the question, ‘What does it mean to be human,’ which is how we compare ourselves to other creatures.

Hoogerwerf: 

Another layer of complexity?

Stump: 

Probably…  Can I introduce one more continuum in this episode? 

Hoogerwerf: 

If you must.

Stump: 

There are various camps among the academic types who talk about human identity, and just like species, there might not be clear dividing lines between them all, but we can lump them together in some groups. Some people only want to talk about human distinctiveness; others want to assert human uniqueness; and still others go all the way to human exceptionalism.

Hoogerwerf: 

Okay, we’ve got distinctiveness, uniqueness, and exceptionalism. There’s other words too: difference, superiority, these all sound like synonyms for each other. There must be some more specific meaning in the technical literature about this topic?

Stump: 

Well that’s one of the problems with language—and we’ll get to more about that in later episodes—not everybody uses the terms in the same way.

Hoogerwerf: 

Just like “human.”

Stump: 

Right. 

Hoogerwerf: 

But you must have something up your sleeve here about these terms.

Stump: 

I don’t think I’m just making this up, but it seems to me that human distinctiveness is at one end of the spectrum the way people talk about these things, making the lowest level claim about humans that we’re merely different from cucumbers and salamanders and chimpanzees; and human distinctiveness researchers are simply trying to lay out those differences in the bottom-up, science-dominated approach.

Hoogerwerf: 

And couldn’t we say that cucumbers, salamanders, and chimpanzees are also distinctive in this way?

Stump: 

Yes!

Hoogerwerf: 

And if they were the ones writing books or producing podcast series, they would be the ones at the center of the story.

Stump: 

Undoubtedly. But the usual response to that from people at the other end of the spectrum is: they aren’t writing books or producing podcast series! We’re the only ones that can do that. And that must mean there is something special about us.

Hoogerwerf: 

Some people want to say “exceptional.”

Stump: 

That’s the term I’m putting at the other end of the continuum. And typically it has connotations not just that we can identify important differences between us and other creatures, but that we’re superior. That God loves us more. That all of the rest of creation was intended to serve us. That all of evolution has been about us; all those other creatures were just means to the end of producing us.

Hoogerwerf: 

That sounds like a particular theological view much more than a scientific conclusion.

Stump: 

Yes, so at that end of the spectrum, it’s dominated by the top-down approach and tends to blur the very important scientific findings of our continuity with other creatures.

Hoogerwerf: 

And I have to say, I’m somewhat uncomfortable with a theology that makes us exceptional in that sense. As if we are really the only things that matter to God? Salamanders may not be making podcasts but they may very well think of themselves as exceptional. 

Stump: 

I don’t think salamanders have the concept “exceptional” and so can’t really think of themselves that way.

Hoogerwerf: 

Okay. But I think it might be fair to say that God thinks of salamanders as exceptional beings. We were not the only creatures made very good, after all… As we went through these interviews attempting to find out all these things that could end up pointing towards an exceptionalism that we have, I also found myself fighting against that, looking for the ways which we may not be as exceptional as we tend to think. 

Lahti: 

I think you are correct to do that, I think that we, we have a problem as sort of sensitive stewards that want to recognize God’s love for his creation in the fact that we are blessed along with the rest of creation, we are told to be humble, and David in his best moments says “What is man that you are mindful of him.” So I think—and we are created from from dirt. And so it is a very appropriate response to be wary of tooting our own horn. 

Stump: 

So there are two extremes, and people often use a spectrum or continuum to show how their view avoids the extremes and is right in the middle. 

Hoogerwerf: 

So what’s in the middle then? 

Stump: 

Uniqueness. I’m not sure if it solves anything by simply putting a label on it, but saying that humans are unique is an attempt to see the insights of each side without going to the extremes.

Hoogerwerf: 

But aren’t all creatures unique? A cucumber has a set of properties that no other living thing has. Isn’t that what it is to be unique?

Stump: 

Yes, we’re forcing that word to take on other connotations here. The claim is that we’re unique in a way that is different from how other things are unique.

Hoogerwerf: 

So unique means one of a kind—but since each creature is unique, there is nothing so special about that. We must take one more leap by saying that humans are unique in a different kind of way. We are redwoods while everything else is a rosebush. We are, as Jeff Schloss put it, spectacular outliers. So maybe we are uniquely unique?

Lahti: 

if we are going to be brutally honest about it, there is no other organism that learns the way we do and can pile on solution onto previous learning. And that is the reason why we are the only species with these kinds of conversations. With basements, you know, full of books and skyscrapers and, and going on to the moon and etc. and moving at whatever speed that we can get ourselves up to. I’m not saying we are—that these things in of themselves are good, morally good. But the ability to do those things requires a cognitive capacity that far exceeds that of any other organism that has ever existed, by far.

Stump: 

I like it. But it doesn’t sound like you’re convinced?

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah, I’m still not sure. It still seems to me like other things could also be uniquely unique. But I’m willing to be convinced. And I think before I’ll be convinced I need to learn a bit more about both what we are made of and what we are made for.

Stump: 

Okay, let’s keep the journey going.

Hoogerwerf: 

Wasn’t it a quest?

Stump: 

Ah yes… watch out for the windmills.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation and more than 300 individuals who donated to our crowdfunding campaign. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We are produced out of the remote workspaces and homes of BioLogos staff in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum. Find more episodes of Language of God on your favorite podcast app or at our website, biologos.org, where you will also find tons of great articles and resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.