What makes Man Unique?

REASONS FOR BELIEVING (2)

What makes Man Unique?

The Question and why it Matters

Man “In the Image of God”

Most religions believe that there is something about human beings which gives us a unique and special place in the world. The Bible teaches that we are made “in the image and likeness of God” (cf. Genesis 1:26) with spiritual souls as well as physical bodies. This means that we are not just material organisms like other living beings, we are spiritual persons. Each of us has an absolute dignity and an eternal value, and we find our true home and our ultimate happiness in relationship with God.

This view of human nature affects more than just obviously ‘religious’ issues and the question of life after death. The soul or spirit in man is seen as the reason for our yearning for inner peace and happiness beyond just the physical pleasures of food, warmth and shelter. It is what drives the quest for truth, beauty and goodness which is the hallmark of all that is best in human culture. It is the key to human intelligence and inventiveness and the source of our ever-increasing control over the forces of nature. It is also what makes us capable of exercising free choices for good or ill, and this confers on us a profound moral responsibility for ourselves and our world.

These ideas have been the bedrock of our civilization for centuries. They have shaped our laws, our culture, our attitudes to care and respect for one another, and even our hopes and dreams. However, the advance of modern science in the last century or so has called into question the idea of the uniqueness of man by questioning the reality of the spiritual soul.

Modern Doubts and Difficulties

The general presumption of many people today is that we are just highly developed animals. In fact some ‘animal rights’ movements challenge the whole idea that there is anything unique or special about human beings. They think that such a notion makes us careless and cruel towards the rest of life on earth. It is even suggested that this Christian teaching is to blame for the pollution of the environment by human dominance and greed. Actually what the book of Genesis teaches is that man was given charge of the earth by God as a sacred trust. This does not mean that we can do whatever we like with it. We were meant to develop the earth and use its resources to build a world of even greater beauty to the glory of God. Greed, selfishness and the abuse of nature came about as a result of sin.

Christians teach that we should not treat animals with cruelty or disrespect, but it is still true that every human life is uniquely and absolutely valuable, unlike any other creature on earth. It is this that has been challenged and undermined in recent times. Inevitably this is having some far reaching consequences. While some people worry about experiments on animals, governments are licensing experiments on human embryos and the cloning of human beings for medical research. And pressure is mounting to legalize euthanasia so that people can have themselves ‘put down’ like a family pet when they grow sick or decrepit.

The main reason why many people doubt there is anything that makes human beings unique is that they think science has disproved the reality of the ‘soul’. They think the only difference between us and other animals is that our brains are bigger. Science has certainly discovered a great deal about the human brain and there is no doubt that it plays a central role in our thoughts, feelings and actions. But does the brain explain everything about us? Is that all there is to being human?

It is interesting to note that animals do not reflect on their own nature and destiny, which is what you are doing right now by reading this pamphlet. As a famous biologist put it in a newspaper article about human origins: “chimps don’t think about the future, we do.”1 The very fact that we can ask about the meaning of our lives is a unique characteristic which is not displayed by any other living thing on earth.

Evidence of Man’s Uniqueness

Freedom from Control

It is almost impossible to escape the conclusion that there is something going on in human beings which is above and beyond other organisms in nature. If a bigger brain were the only difference between us and the animals, then we should expect that we would be just better animals. We should be more specialized to fit into one particular environment. Instead we seem to have moved beyond the control of nature altogether. Of course, like the other animals we do need a material environment in which to live—food, air, water, shelter and warmth—and we do have our instincts. Yet rather than being carefully adapted to one specific place in nature, we seem to be adaptable to almost any place we choose. We have cut loose from the control of any particular environment and created our own artificial ones, even to the point of stepping off this planet altogether.

This implies a very profound difference between us and other animals. It implies that there is a power at work in us which is not a physical type of thing at all. Physical organisms are deterministic—that is, they are fixed or determined by the laws of matter. We do not fit into this pattern. We have taken charge of ourselves and of our world in a way that no other animal does. We control nature rather than nature controlling us. We are not just something that is programmed by nature. In fact we have become creative programmers, designing our own machines to shape the environment. This makes us a different type of creature from every other form of life, not just a higher degree of the same kind of thing.

Sadly, but significantly, we can also see our freedom from deterministic law at work in the worst human behaviour too. Animals may be aggressive in defence of their territory or the pursuit of prey, but they never fight out of pure hatred. Likewise they are very controlled and limited in their mating urges. They certainly do not consume and pollute their own environment to the point of destruction. Nor could they ever threaten the whole ecosystem of the planet like we can. Nor do they corrupt their own nature with drug addiction or abusive behaviour. Material life is locked into the cycles of nature of which it is a part. How is it, then, that we alone can disobey the promptings of instinct and go against the fixed patterns of nature, even though this can harm us and harm nature itself? There is something about us that seems to have crossed an invisible boundary and leapt into a new dimension of life on this earth.

Thinking beyond Survival

Not only do we go against our animal instincts at times, there are also some human activities which seem to be nothing to do with survival at all. An animal’s brain is finely adapted to the needs of its body by responding to signals from its environment. This is all about survival.

There is no room in nature for animals to be creative or philosophical in the way that we are. After all, to be eaten by a lion while you are contemplating the meaning of life, love and the universe is hardly in keeping with ‘the survival of the fittest’.

Artistic activity is another mark of human beings which has no survival value and is not found in nature. A spider’s web can be very beautiful to our eyes, but to the spider it is a wholly practical thing. Birds ‘sing’ to mark their territory or attract a mate, but we sing simply to celebrate life and the beauty of the world for its own sake.

Speaking in Tongues

Human language has some unique characteristics too. Animals in the wild use a whole range of natural signs to communicate with each other. The meaning of these is fixed by genes or by the environment. But human beings use words which have no limit as to what we choose them to mean. “We can name things we cannot see, like an atom, or put a one-word label on an impossibly complex idea such as the universe.”2 We have developed many different languages or sound systems and we frequently make up new words when we need to talk about something new—like ‘computers’, for example.

The important element in human language is the idea—the mental content of what we are talking about—whatever language we choose to say it in. You could read a translation of a love poem, for example, that was originally written in a language you do not know. But through the translation you would understand exactly what the poem was about, because the words express ideas which do not depend on the physical sounds we make.

Writing down our ideas using invented signs and codes is itself unique to humans. We have developed ways to communicate our most abstract ideas about the world, like mathematics and computer programming. It is true that we appear to be able to teach some captive apes to communicate with us in a basic way through specially designed signs. Of course we should expect there to be similarities in individual and social behaviour between us and the animals, especially the higher animals with their more developed brains. It may be that we are actually developing the brains of these naturally social animals beyond what they would do on their own. But while we can enter the animal world and learn to communicate with them on their level, they cannot speak to us about our human concerns. What distinguishes us from the rest of the animal world is that we have literally created a world of our own: an inner, mental world of thoughts and dreams which has taken us to the boundaries of the universe— and beyond.

The Human Factor

The higher life forms do have a high degree of awareness of themselves and their own world, but their awareness remains at the level of physical needs and social interaction in a world of material bodies. They do not attempt to discuss abstract ideas or to ask questions about the world in the way a human child does.

“… an animal’s plane of consciousness [is] tied to the world of the moment. Humans on the other hand, can also fill their consciousness with memories and imagination … the inner voice.”3

Animals often live alongside us and in our homes, where they can become imprinted with human-like characters and we respond to them with affection, but they cannot truly understand the inner world of the human mind.

Archaeologists have also uncovered evidence of a sharp boundary in evolution between human beings and other animal life forms, as well as physical continuity. They speak of a time when physical and genetic evolution stopped being the driving force of progress in nature, and ‘culture’—the development of ideas and values— becomes the big issue.4

Do we have Souls?

The Problem with Materialism

Some people argue that this unique human factor is just the result of physical energies working together. For example:

“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”5

It is suggested that the cumulative effect of billions of brain cells interacting reaches a point where nature shifts up a gear into the new and mysterious phenomenon we call ‘self-consciousness’. The problem with this sort of theory is that however much we multiply physical processes, they must, by definition, remain physical in their working. Whereas human consciousness appears to have taken us outside the range of material laws and limits altogether. How do “nerve cells and their associated molecules” come to understand themselves and the laws that made them, even when they work together in vast numbers?

Someone who rejects the idea of the soul has to say that all unique human traits must be the product of physical evolution. Despite many theories as to how this might have come about, no one has found any physical evidence to support such a view. The truth is that some scientists start all investigation into the human mind with the idea that nothing exists except material things in the first place. So the idea of the soul is excluded at the outset, which is simply begging the question.

Of course it is fair to say that, by definition, the soul falls outside the scope of laboratory experiments. So we cannot expect science to deal with it directly. But neither does this mean that the soul is unreal or that the very idea of it is irrational. After all we can study the physics of sound waves, but this does not tell us whether there is such a thing as music. Similarly science can tell us many fascinating things about the workings of the brain, but cannot explain why we are scientists in the first place! Science cannot tell us what makes us persons who ask about our world and about ourselves.

It is no surprise that doctors cannot find someone’s soul by dissecting their body, because it is not just another component part of a human being, like the lungs or the liver. The soul, it will be argued, is the guiding principle which controls and directs the whole body. It is that centre of our personalities which we commonly refer to as our ‘mind’ and our ‘heart’. So to worry that you cannot find someone’s soul by opening up their head is to misunderstand the sort of thing that is being discussed. It is rather like taking a clock to pieces and complaining that you cannot find ‘the time’ anywhere inside it! It will be shown that the soul must be spiritual, which means that we cannot see it with our physical eyes. But spiritual things are no less real for being invisible. After all no one has seen an idea and yet ideas are the essential starting point of science itself. And no one has been able to come up with the formula for love, yet few would deny how important love is for our life and our happiness.

The Amazing Brain of Man

So what is it, then, that makes human beings so different and unique? If we begin by looking at the animals, we find that they live according to a pattern which we call instinct. Every species has its own pattern of instincts which are built around its physical needs. And it is the brain which controls and directs all the energies and instincts of an animal. But the brain is part of the whole system of nature. It evolved from the material universe and it must be tuned into the signals and cycles of nature in order to do its job properly. The brain needs information and ‘programming’ from the things in its environment so that it can react to life in a balanced way.

If we follow the evolution of life from the simplest creatures to the higher primates (chimpanzees and gorillas) we find that, “Brain size has increased over evolutionary time, and behaviour has become more complex. The two are undeniably linked; as more stimuli become important … there will be selection for enhanced ability to cope with an increased amount of information.” 6

The important factor is not just that brains get physically bigger, but that the cortex or grey matter in the frontal lobes of the brain increases in area.

“The  two-millimetre-thick  cerebral  cortex  is  the  part  of  the  brain  most  involved  with  making  novel associations. Ours is extensively wrinkled but, were it flattened out, it would occupy four sheets of typing paper. A chimpanzee’s cortex would fit on one sheet, a monkey’s on a postcard, a rat’s on a stamp.”7

Scientists have discovered that as brains in nature get bigger relative to the size of the body, so the cortex gets bigger too, according to a certain mathematical relationship. It was also found that the brains of the primates actually have a higher proportion of cortex to brain size than other groups of animals. It looks like nature zooms in on the brain as the goal of evolution when it reaches the primate branch of the tree of life. Most significantly it was then discovered that the human brain “is fully three times bigger than would be predicted for the brain of a hypothetical primate of our build.”8 This means that the cortex of the human brain is very much larger than would be expected. Clearly when human beings appeared something new and dramatic happened in evolution which caused “a quantum leap in cleverness and foresight.”9 Is this the explanation of man?

The Need for a bigger Explanation

The point has already been made that a bigger and better brain cannot be the only difference between us and the animals. Human beings do not just do what animals do, only better. There is a whole new principle at work in us. The extra power of the human brain must have taken man beyond the control of the physical environment altogether. But the vital question then is: what is the ‘new principle’ that takes control of the overflowing mental energies of man?

Looked  at  logically,  of  course,  nature  should  not  be  able  to  produce  an  animal  which  is  beyond environmental control. We could imagine a super brain that had reached the very limits of physical evolution, yet was still within the control of its material environment. But if a brain were to evolve that went one step further, then nature could not give it any programme of life. Such a creature would have no place or meaning in nature.

Theoretically speaking this should not happen. Everything in the universe, especially the brain, is built on a principle of control and direction. Nature cannot break this fundamental law without the whole cosmic process being undermined. And even if it could happen by some strange mutation, such a creature would be unnatural in every way. It would surely destroy itself if it did not destroy everything else first!

So in reality such an event should be impossible, at least by the power of matter on its own. And yet here we are. Evidently there was a massive jump in brain power which brought about homo sapiens. And even more significantly, something has given human beings the power to control and direct this new mental energy in a completely new way. So how did we get here? How do we explain ourselves?

An Argument for the Soul

First we must accept that the evolution of the universe is not a random process, nor does it happen ‘on its own’. The way the laws of matter fit together as a unity tells us that the universe is the work of a single supreme Mind which we call God. This argument cannot be explored here. It is more fully explained in the Faith pamphlet Can we be sure God exists? The important point is that under God’s plan of creation the universe unfolds according to natural laws of balance and harmony, of ‘control and direction’, to produce all the many forms of life we see today. Finally evolution reaches its limit in the way outlined above. Nature produces a creature with the biggest and best brain that the physical environment can control. This would have been a highly developed ape-like creature which was the immediate ancestor of man.

Since any further step up in brain power would take life beyond the control of the material world, God himself must create a new power of control and direction at the instant this new creature comes into being. It must be a power of self-control which is internal and integral to each member of this new species, because this can no longer come from the external environment. But it cannot be something material—something which arises from the organization of proteins and electrical energies within the body. It has gone beyond that. So it must be non- material, which means that it must be ‘spiritual’. This is to say that it is like the eternal Mind of God: a personal power to control and direct; a conscious power to think, to choose and to act.

It is important to emphasize that God is not caught by surprise with this development in his creation. He designed the universe to arrive at this point all along. In fact it is central to his eternal plan for creation. The creation of the soul is not a sudden or arbitrary interference by God in the course of evolution. It is in accordance with the law of control and direction which is the foundation of the universe from the start. So God could not have decided to ‘put a soul into’ a cat or a dolphin. God does not do meaningless things. The first man came about because the power of brains in nature had developed up to the critical point where it had to be gathered up into union with mind or spirit in order to make sense. At this point a whole new chapter in the history of creation began—the story of man.

The Beginnings of Man

Human Nature: Body and Soul

The spiritual soul in man must come directly from God, but this does not mean that it is somehow added onto an already complete organism. The formula or pattern that makes up the human body cannot exist without the spirit to hold it together and give it a meaning and a purpose. Whenever a new human life is conceived, the soul must be created at the same instant by God. (This is why every human being is absolutely valuable from the moment of their conception onwards.) This must have been true at the conception of the first human being and it is equally true of every new child who comes into the world. The body comes about from the sperm and egg of parents just like other animals, but the soul is created immediately by God at the instant the body is conceived. God will do this because his creative wisdom and loving will for his creatures is ever present and perfect, and he constantly provides what is needed for creation to function properly and come to its fulfilment.

Just as we can say that the body makes no sense without the soul, so the soul is not independent of the body. Our souls do not exist ‘up in heaven’ before coming into union with our bodies. Nor can we be ‘reincarnated’ into other bodies for other lifetimes. The body and soul are created together to make a single, unique person. In fact we are not fully ourselves without both the physical and spiritual dimensions.

The Facts of Life and Death

Nonetheless it is Catholic teaching that when our bodies die, our souls continue to live.10 This makes sense when we reflect that the body is a pattern or formula of physical energies which can break down into its component parts. But the soul is spiritual, which means that it is not made by physical processes and cannot break down or decay. Once the soul is created it lives for ever. So body and soul are not identical, even though both together are essential to being human.

The separation of body and soul at death is not how things were meant to be. This was a result of sin. God originally intended human beings to be lifted up into perfect loving communion with himself. If God’s plan did not ultimately include our bodies, then we might wonder why he bothered creating bodies or the whole material universe at all. But the Bible tells us that at the very core of God’s plan, God the Son himself “was made flesh and made his tabernacle among us.” (John 1:14) In this way we can all be joined to God in a human way and even flesh and blood can share in his eternal life.

Of course bodies do not naturally live for ever. But the body lives through the soul, and if our souls are filled with the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ, then the whole person will be transformed to live for ever with God— the body as well as the soul. We call this final transformation of the body at the end of time the resurrection. We do not yet know what the body will be like in this eternal form, but belief in the resurrection is central to the Christian faith.11

What the Bible says

When we understand ourselves in the way already outlined, we can see that human beings are indeed something new and distinctive in the universe. We have spiritual souls and yet at the same time we are truly part of the physical processes of nature, with bodies like the rest of the animal world. This fits perfectly with what the Bible tells us about the creation of human beings.

The Bible gives us a simple but profound account of creation told in symbolic language which does not contradict science or philosophy. (Even the names Adam and Eve are symbolic: ‘Adam’ means ‘Man of earth’ and

‘Eve’ means ‘Mother of life’). The Book of Genesis simply says that God formed the body of the first man from the “dust of the earth”—that is from the matter which makes up the rest of physical life—and then we are told that God “breathed” into him the spiritual life of the soul. (Cf. Genesis 2:7)

Thus, in accordance with the Biblical vision, we should say that both body and soul are God’s work in their different ways. Our bodies are God’s work through the evolution of matter, which reaches a peak in the human brain, and our souls are individually created by God at conception.

What does Science say?

This explanation of man as body and soul also fits perfectly well with the scientific theory that we descended from the apes, as long as we understand that correctly. Strictly speaking evolutionary theory does not say that we came from modern apes, but from a special branch of the primate family tree, the hominids, which led up to the modern human form. We are indeed closely related to the primates in a genetic way, and the apes and hominids are thought to have had a common ancestor several million years ago. (In fact we are genetically related to every living thing on this planet.) So as far as the body is concerned we can happily accept that we evolved from an earlier species. But, as we have seen, the soul—which is essential to our identity and to our very existence—is directly created by God at a definite moment in history.

We do not know with much accuracy when this happened. The best guess of contemporary science is that modern humans begin about 150,000–200,000 years ago. But there are still many questions to be answered—and, in any case, it is difficult to work out whether someone had a soul just from a piece of their shin or their jaw bone, which is the kind of fossil evidence that palaeontologists have to interpret. Nonetheless it is a simple fact of logic that someone must have been the first true human being. There cannot really be such a thing as a ‘missing link’ or halfway house between animal and man. You cannot have half a soul.

The World of Man

The Soul Develops the Brain

It is true that thoughts register as electrical signals in the brain and different parts of the cortex light up according to various moods and activities. But we cannot say whether this is the cause of our mental activity or just an effect of it. The truth is that the spiritual and physical dimensions are intimately intertwined in everything we do. So the human mind is both the brain and the soul acting together. The soul does not make the brain redundant, far from it. In fact we would expect the soul to greatly enhance the human brain. The soul will build on the natural skills and powers which we inherit from the animal world and considerably develop the human brain.

We know that some chimpanzees have learned to employ simple tools, but a particular mark of man seems to be the ability to design tools for making other tools. This involves a sophisticated level of abstract thinking and planning. And there seems little doubt that the control of fire is a completely unique mark of humankind. Our technological progress has now even taken control of the hidden forces within the atom. Such mastery over the energies of the cosmos is a key sign of the soul working with and through our brains.

We have even made our own artificial survival systems so we can travel through the air, under water or into outer space. We have actually created new chemical elements. And we are now gaining control over life itself— and sadly misusing our knowledge—as we unravel its genetic codes. Even money and the global economies we build are indications of the spiritual control we exercise over the world through our amazing brains. We are also capable of inventing completely imaginary worlds as we express our own creative powers through literature, cinema and computer games, for example.

Religion: the true Mark of Man

But the most telling sign of man’s unique place in nature is that we are religious beings. We search for answers about the meaning of our world and we long to be loved unconditionally and everlastingly. We reach out beyond created things towards the infinite as we search for the truth about our life and destiny. There is evidence that human beings have searched for relationship with the transcendent realm through symbols and rituals right from the dawn of history. Temples, shrines and signs of belief in life after death can be found from the earliest times, even with Neanderthal man.

Religion is not the result of some childish fear and ignorance in primitive human beings. It is the most natural manifestation of our spiritual nature. The soul has greatly enhanced our mental capacity, so that we can probe into the very depths of the material world. We are discovering the makeup of the universe and even the secrets of our own bodies. Yet none of this can truly satisfy the human spirit. The material things of creation, although they are good and beautiful in themselves, cannot give us what we need. This is because we have spiritual souls and so we need a spiritual environment to control and direct us, and we need a spiritual relationship of love in order to find fulfilment.

Although people often try to find happiness in money, career, food, drink, sex and physical comforts, or in music, art and other beautiful things, these things are not enough for us. In fact we can cause great harm to ourselves and others if we try to turn these things into the be-all and end-all of our lives. Like everything else in creation we need something greater than ourselves to teach and guide us and to bring us to perfect maturity. Only God can do this for us. This means that God himself is our natural and personal environment.

Just as the animals are designed to live in harmony with their environment, so we need to live in a personal relationship with God in order to be happy, healthy and whole. As St Augustine wrote in the 4th century A.D.: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”12 This is true for each one of us as individuals, and it is also true of the human race as a group. We are not just another species of animal living on the earth. Humanity is a family which takes its name and its guidance from God who is our Father (cf. Ephesians 3:14-15).

God our Living Environment

If God is our environment then it is natural for us to seek God. Yet we are physical beings in a physical world. So we need God to make himself known to us in a material, historical and down to earth way. Christians believe that he has done exactly this. God has revealed his love and his truth to us and this too is a unique privilege of man.

From the beginning of history God has surrounded man with wisdom and love. God’s presence and power—his grace—is like sunshine to our souls, causing us to grow in spiritual depth and happiness. God has prompted in the minds of men an ever fuller vision of truth, to guide our consciences in the way of integrity, and to make us more and more alive with inner peace and joy. God intended us to live in this state of grace from the first moment of our existence. As it says in the Bible: “We are His handiwork, created in Christ Jesus, designed from the start that we might walk in the ways of goodness.” (Ephesians 2:10)

For in the fullness of time God became man so that we could know him and love him perfectly and live with him for ever. This is the true destiny of man. This is the ultimate source of our unique dignity as children of God. Only with the coming of Jesus Christ—who was proud to call himself the ‘Son of Man’—do we understand ourselves fully.

The Tragedy and the Triumph of Humanity

But when trying to understand ourselves in our relationship to God, we must remember that the special feature of human nature, which distinguishes us from the animals, is our freedom of choice. Our spiritual nature makes us capable of love, which is always a free choice and a free gift of its very nature. So we are invited, not forced, into relationship with God. We can refuse his love and reject his grace. We can say ‘no’ as well as ‘yes’ to the instinct for goodness that we feel in our conscience.

But if man does refuse goodness and reject the grace of God, the consequences are tragic and terrible, as it would be for any creature if it shut itself off from its environment. We inherit an instinctive sense of what is balanced and healthy from the whole history of living things. Therefore the human body naturally expects the soul to continue acting according to goodness and right. So the first time a human being broke the law of the universe by doing deliberate evil, it would not only harm their personal friendship with God, it would shatter the fine balance of control and direction within their own bodies. And it would disrupt their relationship with the whole of nature and also with their fellow human beings.

Tragically this  is  exactly  what  happened when the  first  human beings sinned. They  not  only  harmed themselves, they harmed human nature itself. And so we all inherit a nature from our first parents which is handicapped in its ability to respond in an ordered way to what is life-giving—including God himself. We find that we are deprived of grace and easily tempted to evil. We also find that our bodies grow sick and weak and eventually break down and die as we go back to the ‘dust’ from which we were made. This whole package of misery is what Catholics refer to as original sin.13 Understanding this teaching can help us to comprehend both the glory and the tragedy of man, who is both uniquely blessed and uniquely cursed.

But sin is not the end of the story. Man holds a unique place in the heart of God since we are made in his own image and likeness. Through Jesus Christ we are called to share in God’s own divine nature (cf. 2 Peter 1:4). Therefore he did not abandon us to sin and death, but came to rescue us himself. This is the final, crowning glory of man. We have been redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and filled with his Holy Spirit. Once again these mysteries cannot be explored here14—this is just a glimpse of the fuller vision of what makes man unique.

Summing Up

Return to the Centre

In the medieval worldview, man was considered to be at the centre of creation. For a while modern science appeared to have dethroned man from his place at the heart of creation, but science itself is beginning to revise that opinion. Of course we know that we are not at the physical centre of the universe, but Einstein has shown that there is no such place in any case—all space is relative. It is the human mind, which has risen above material evolution and controls the laws of matter for itself, that puts man at the ‘centre’ of the cosmos. If there is life on other planets which is both physical and spiritual, then this too is ‘man’, whatever its physical form. They would not really be ‘aliens’ but children of God too; and they too would be at the ‘centre’.

It is even suggested by some scientists that the entire evolutionary progress of the universe reaches its peak in man. It seems that the initial conditions of the cosmos are set out precisely to produce the human brain. This thought is known in scientific and philosophical discussion as the anthropic principle. This pamphlet has tried to explore and explain this same thought, but from an even fuller and richer perspective.

If there had been no control and direction through the millions of years of evolution, then nothing at all would have evolved. For nothing can be its own cause and its own control. Everything must be in contact with something else that shapes and controls it and gives it its sense of direction. This is the most basic law of the universe: where you have control and direction there is meaning and purpose; and where there is meaning and purpose there is mind. This is how we know that behind everything that exists there is the Mind of the Creator— that is God.

With the living creatures who were on earth before man, their environment—which means everything they needed to grow and develop properly—gave them their control and direction. But at the precise moment when a creature appeared which had the potential for its brain to grow beyond the needs of physical survival and beyond the control of the material environment, God created into it its own inner power of control and direction. This is the spiritual soul, which is capable of objective knowledge and of making free choices between good and evil.

In Him we Live

With man’s new mastery over life on earth through the soul’s control of the developing brain, man also needs to be given direction like everything else in existence. Man seeks life and life to the full in a spiritual way. So God in person must be the environment that is appropriate to human nature. As the Bible puts it: “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) God must therefore speak to man as ‘man to man’. God reveals himself in a way we can understand and he touches our lives in a human way. This is why God became man. This is why Jesus Christ is “the Way, the Truth and the Life” for all of us. (Cf. John 14:6)

And even though human beings had severely damaged their own nature through the choice and habit of evil, and despite the fact that they rejected him when he came, Jesus set about restoring man’s relationship with God. Anyone who accepts him is brought to perfection in the Divine Life by being joined to his Body and Blood and filled with his Holy Spirit. All of this is the unique history, identity and vocation of human beings. It can all be summed up in one sentence: the universe is for man, man is for Christ, and Christ takes us all to the Father.

1 Stephen Jones, The Daily Telegraph, 25 July 2001.

2 John McCrone, The Ape that Spoke, Picador/MacMillan, 1991, p. 135.

3 John McCrone, The Ape that Spoke, p. 139.

4 Cf. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Jean Chavaillon, eds., Origins of the Human Brain, OUP-USA, 1996.

5 Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1994, p3.

6    Scott  Rifkind  in  Harvard’s  Undergraduate  Neuroscience  Magazine,  vol.  2,  issue  I,  Spring  1995,  published  at http://hcs.harvard.edu/~husn/BRAIN/vol2/Primate.html

7 William H. Calvin, “The Emergence of Intelligence”, Scientific American 9(4), November 1998, pp. 44-51.

8 Richard Passingham, “Why Chimpanzees Are Not People”, New Scientist, 4 November 1982, pp. 288-291.

9 William H. Calvin, “The Emergence of Intelligence”.

10 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 362 and 368.

11 This will be explored more fully in a further Faith pamphlet in this series, A Plan for the Fullness of Time.

12 St Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 1, ch. 1.

13  This subject will be dealt with more fully in the Faith pamphlet in this series, The Disaster of Sin. See also the Faith pamphlet, Evolution and Original Sin by Roger Nesbitt.

14 They will be addressed in further Faith pamphlets in this series, Jesus Christ our Saviour and Jesus Christ our Redeemer.

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