Restorative Moves to Recover Our Humanity and Dignity

Further on the quest to retrieve our deeper humanitas, we move beyond scientism’s caricature of human existence, towards a whole and healthy picture of persons. We want to recover our lost heritage as Christian humanists (David Lyle Jeffrey, Andy Crouch, Culture Making; Jens Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism; Erasmus). What are we to make of homo sapiens sapiens? Under scientism, influential thinkers like Nietzsche and Skinner have charted a cultural course beyond good and evil, while also relieving us of our freedom and dignity. It is indeed a surprisingly unpleasant road to nihilism. Reductionistic anthropologies have led to much political oppression and abuse as seen under Pinochet, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Mugabe and Hitler in the twentieth century, where the government became the pirate of the people. They live an atheism rich with a will to power and without human rights. Scientific materialism has morphed into political-economic exploitation, with massive human suffering and extensive violence and loss. We must protest this impoverished and exploitive view of persons and seek an alternative, one that is urgent in our age of global terrorism, economic challenges, shrinking resources and political flash points (see Al Gore, The Future: six drivers of global change. 2013).

Humans must be distinguished from nature. Certainly, a person is continuous with nature biologically; this is one of the reasons that human biology has been so successful. But we should not settle for views of our identity reduced to our biological origins or biological infrastructure; humans are not only a part of nature, they definitely stand apart from nature in significant ways. They are much more complex and sophisticated than animals or machines despite the similarities. We can do serious damage when we do not recognize these distinctions. Much that is deeply true about us transcends our biology, chemistry and physics. Humans are an order of magnitude different from animals in many capacities: e.g. human altruism goes far beyond genetic altruism. Consider Oscar Shindler, says Francis Collins head the National Institute of Health brain mapping program, who took incredible risks to save those who were not of his tribe or DNA. Read More…

Are We Missing the Bigger Picture?

Further on the quest to recover our humanity in the age of scientism: In this post, we find ourselves on a quest to retrieve excluded knowledge [1], addressing the refusal of the transcendent inherent in scientism, including that biases endemic to the New Atheists’ writing.[2] During the Cold War, the Soviets often constructed city maps that excluded churches, a practice that made it difficult for tourists to find some of the architectural and historical treasures. The agenda was to eliminate knowledge of religion or God (exclude/bury it). This practise  stands in the true spirit of scientism; it operates on a cosmic authority dilemma. Philosopher Charles Taylor offers some very useful discernment here; he notes that transcendence can be read from two opposite angles, both of which involve faith at some significant level, i.e. it goes beyond mere rational argument or evidence.

We can either see the transcendent as a threat, a dangerous temptation, or an obstacle to our greatest good. Or we can read it as answering to our deepest craving, need, fulfilment of the good. … Both open and closed stances involve a step beyond available reason into the realm of anticipatory confidence.[3]

This is a moral choice as well, not neutral, nor scientifically objective. Within today’s immanent frame, Taylor points out that things do go both ways; this is in fact true of professional scientists today. Many hold to the reality of the transcendent; many do not. Read More…