But what will guide this evolution? How will we know whether any of these so-called enhancements is, in fact, an improvement? Why should any human being embrace a post-human future? Scientism has no answers to these critical moral questions. Deaf to nature, to God, and even to moral reason, it can offer no standards for judging change to be progress—or for judging anything else. Instead, it tacitly preaches its own version of faith, hope, and charity: faith in the goodness of scientific progress, hope in the promise of overcoming our biological limitations, charity in assuring everyone ultimate relief from, and transcendence of, the human condition. No religious faith rests on flimsier ground.

So this is our peculiar moral and religious crisis. We are in turbulent seas without a landmark precisely because we adhere more and more to a view of human life that gives us enormous power but, at the same time, denies any possibility of non-arbitrary standards for guiding its use. Though well equipped, we know not who we are or where we are going. Engineering the engineer as well as the engine, we race our train we know not where.

 

Will we be able to combat the dehumanizing teachings and moral bankruptcy of soulless scientism? As a cultural matter, it is difficult to predict. But we are not intellectually or spiritually resourceless. On the contrary, we have good philosophical arguments to rebut the soulless teachings of scientism, and we have ennobling scriptural truths to nourish the human soul. Together, they make possible a human defense of the human. Let me offer a few elements of such a defense, starting on the philosophical side.

First, despite what scientism says, our evolutionary origins do not refute the truth of our human distinctiveness. The history of how we came to be is no substitute for knowing directly the being that has come. To know man, we must study him as he is and through what he does, not how he got to be this way. To understand our nature—what we are—or our standing in the world, it matters not whether our origin was from the primordial slime or from the hand of a creator God: Even with monkeys for ancestors, what has emerged is more than monkey business.

Second, regarding our inwardness, freedom, and purposiveness, we must repair to our inside knowledge. Even if scientists were to “prove” to their satisfaction that inwardness, consciousness, and human will or intention were all illusory—at best, epiphenomena of brain events—or that what we call loving and wishing and thinking are merely electrochemical transformations of brain substance, we should proceed to ignore them. And for good reason. Life’s self-revelatory testimony to the living regarding its own vital activity is more immediate, compelling, and trustworthy than are the abstracted explanations that evaporate lived experience by identifying it with some correlated bodily event. The most unsophisticated child knows red and blue more reliably than a blind physicist with his spectrometers. And anyone who has ever loved knows that love cannot be reduced to neurotransmitters.

Third, truth and error, no less than human freedom and dignity, become empty notions when the soul is reduced to chemicals. The very possibility of science depends on the immateriality of thought and on the mind’s independence from the bombardment of matter. If what each person believes is merely the verbalized expression of his “electrochemical brain processes,” there is no independent truth, there is only “it seems to me.” Not only the possibility for recognizing truth and error, but also the reasons for doing science rest on a picture of human freedom and dignity that science itself cannot recognize. Wonder, curiosity, a wish not to be self-deceived, and a spirit of philanthropy are the sine qua non of the modern scientific enterprise. They are hallmarks of the living human soul, not of the anatomized brain.

A philosophical critique of scientism may give us back our souls and restore human distinctiveness. But philosophy alone cannot answer the longings of our soul or supply its quest for meaning. For such nourishment, we must turn to other sources, most especially the Bible.

 

The Bible offers a profound teaching on human nature, but, unlike science, it places that teaching in relation to the deepest human longings and concerns. For various reasons, we should turn first to the Bible’s majestic beginning, the story of creation in the Book of Genesis—which, not surprisingly, is the chief target of our soulless scientism. Elsewhere, I have argued that the teachings of Genesis 1 are, in fact, untouched by the scientific findings that allegedly make them “plumb unbelievable.”5 The reason is that Genesis’ account of creation is not a freestanding historical or scientific account of what happened and how, but rather an awe-inspiring prelude to a lengthy and comprehensive teaching about how we are to live. The Bible addresses us not as detached, rational observers moved primarily by curiosity, but as existentially engaged human beings who need first and foremost to make sense of their world and their task within it. The first human question is not “How did this come into being?” or “How does it work?” The first human question is “What does all this mean?” and, especially, “What am I to do here?”

The specific claims of the biblical account of creation begin to nourish the soul’s deep longings for answers to these questions. The world that you see around you, you human being, is orderly and intelligible, an articulated whole comprising distinct kinds. The order of the world is as rational as the speech that you use to describe it and that, right before your (reading) eyes, summoned it into being. Most importantly, this intelligible order of creatures means mainly to demonstrate that, contrary to the belief of uninstructed human experience, the sun, the moon, and the stars are not divine, despite their sempiternal eternal beauty and power and their majestic, perfect motion. Moreover, being is hierarchic, and man is the highest of the creatures, higher than the heavens. Man alone is a being that is in the image of God.

What does this mean? And can it be true? In the course of recounting His creation, Genesis 1 introduces us to God’s activities and powers: (1) God speaks, commands, names, blesses, and hallows; (2) God makes and makes freely; (3) God looks at and beholds the world; (4) God is concerned with the goodness of things; (5) God addresses solicitously other living creatures and provides for their sustenance. In short, God exercises speech and reason, freedom in doing and making, and the powers of contemplation, judgment, and care.

Doubters may wonder whether this is truly the case about God—after all, it is only on biblical authority that we regard God as possessing these powers and activities. But it is indubitably clear—even to atheists—that we human beings have them and that they lift us above the plane of a merely animal existence. Human beings, alone among the creatures, speak, plan, create, contemplate, and judge. Human beings, alone among the creatures, can articulate a future goal and use that plan to guide them in bringing it into being. Human beings, alone among the creatures, can think about the whole, marvel at its many-splendored forms, wonder about its beginning, and feel awe in beholding its grandeur and in pondering the mystery of its source.

Please note: These self-evident truths do not rest on biblical authority. Rather, the biblical text enables us to confirm them by an act of self-reflection. Our reading of this text, addressable and intelligible only to us human beings, and our responses to it, possible only for us human beings, provide all the proof we need to confirm the text’s assertion of our superior standing. This is not anthropocentric prejudice, but cosmological truth. And nothing we shall ever learn from science about how we came to be this way could ever make it false.

The Bible here teaches a truth that cannot be known by science, even as it is the basis of the very possibility of science—and of everything else we esteem. For it truly is very good that there is something rather than nothing. It truly is very good that this something is intelligibly ordered rather than dark and chaotic. It truly is very good that the whole contains a being who can not only discern the intelligible order but who can recognize that “it is very good”—who can appreciate that there is something rather than nothing and that he exists with the reflexive capacity to celebrate these facts with the mysterious source of being itself. As Abraham Joshua Heschel put it:

The biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world’s having come into being. “And God saw that it was good.”7

There is more. The purpose of the song is not only to celebrate. It is also to summon us to awe and attention. Just as the created world is a world summoned into existence under command, to be a human being in that world is to live in search of a summons. It is to recognize, first of all, that we are here not by choice or on account of merit, but as an undeserved gift from powers not at our disposal. It is to feel the need to justify that gift, to make something out of our indebtedness for the opportunity of existence. It is to stand in the world not only in awe of the world’s existence but under an obligation to answer a call to a worthy life, a life of meaning, a life that does honor to the divine likeness with which our otherwise animal being has been—no thanks to us—endowed. It is to feel the explicit need to find a way of life for which we should be pleased to answer at the bar of justice when our course is run, in order to vindicate the blessed opportunity and the moral-spiritual challenge that is the true essence of being human.

The first chapter of Genesis—like no work of science, no matter how elegant or profound—invites us to hearken to a transcendent voice. It answers the human need to know not only how the world works but also what we are to do here. It is the beginning of a Bible-length response to the human longing for meaning and wholehearted existence. The truths it bespeaks are more than cognitive. They point away from mere truths of belief to the truths of life in action—of song and praise and ritual, of love and procreation and civic life, of responsible deeds in answering the call to righteousness, holiness, and love of neighbor. Such truths speak more deeply and permanently to the souls of men than any mere doctrine, whether of science or even of faith. As long as we understand our great religions as the embodiments of such truths, we friends of religion will have nothing to fear from science, and we friends of science who are still in touch with our humanity will have nothing to fear from religion.

Like Max and Jake, I have no knowledge about the world to come. Unlike Max and Jake, I have never given it more than a moment’s thought. For whatever might be the fate of our souls when act five is over, it is the pursuit of their well-being here and now, while the show is still running, that is in my opinion the crucial human task—yesterday, today, always. Regarding this truth and this work, no soulless teachings of science or scientism should ever leave us buffaloed.

Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. This article is a slightly modified version of the 2007 Wriston Lecture, delivered at the Manhattan Institute, New York City, on October 18, 2007.

 

1. Erich Heller, “Faust’s Damnation: The Morality of Knowledge,” in Heller, The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 18.

2. International Academy of Humanism, “Statement in Defense of Cloning and the Integrity of Scientific Research,” May 16, 1997, reprinted in Free Inquiry 17:3 (Summer 1997), and available online at www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/cloning_declaration_17_3.html.

3. Steven Pinker, “A Matter of Soul,” The Weekly Standard, February 2, 1998, p. 6.

4. For a thorough examination of these prospects and the attendant ethical and social issues, see Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, a report by the President’s Council on Bioethics (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2003), available online at www.bioethics.gov. Commercial additions are available from Judith Regan Books and Dana Press.

5. See Leon R. Kass, “Awesome Beginnings,” in Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York: Free Press, 2003). See also Leon R. Kass, “Evolution and the Bible: Genesis I Revisited,” Commentary, November 1988, pp. 29—39.

6. Genesis 1:31.

7. Abraham J. Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford: Stanford, 1965), p. 115.