Where does anything begin? Regardless of its specific form or context, our human experience seems to center around a notional perception of continuity. Each day we awaken to a belief that we existed yesterday, and each and every moment before the present. It’s easy for this to seem like a needless distinction. Obviously, we can make any number of delineations on events or distinctions: when we are conceived, or our heart first beats, or we are born, or our first memory. Any one of these may constitute one's opinion on the beginning of a human life, but each and every one requires a prior existence that makes the decision that this distinction designates the "beginning" seem rather insouciant.
The meaning of a beginning for humanity is equally perplexing if not equally peripheral. Our love of continuity prefers to accept the prevailing theory of evolution, but this only serves to raise the "species problem." Nature does not construct boundaries with bright lines; species are simply concepts we humans use to make sense of constant change. The theory of evolution implies that each species is only a snapshot taken within a continuous flow. For cognitive and practical reasons, we draw arbitrary lines in that flow in order to define categories. This seems to indicate that humans never "came to exist" but rather (perhaps out of necessity) at some point we decided that differences between before and after some prolonged sequence of change were worthy of drawing that distinction.
Discarding the theory of evolution for a moment in favor of Christian creationist dogma, we can trade the gradual morphing of biological entities over time for an ontological leap: before Adam there are no humans, and after God creates Adam, there are humans. Using this argument, the beginning of humanity is defined as the moment that God creates the first human in the Imago Dei. This seems to solve our problem of defining a beginning for humanity, but if we continue under this alternate premise we have to define the meaning of God's image; is it the quality of His rationality? His moral capacity? Or are we made in the image of the essence of the Holy Spirit, imbuing humans with a soul—divine likeness? Regardless, the Christian Church itself has wrestled with these challenges for nearly 2000 years. If it is so easy to define what makes us human, it stands to reason that it should be equally possible to define what makes one a "true Christian." And yet, anyone with awareness of Christendom knows questions like "which beliefs make you a Christian?" or "when does deviancy cross the line into heresy?" or "which people are in and which are out?" have as many answers as there are Christian sects. Here we discover that we have only delayed our challenge of defining humanity, trading the ambiguity from genetics to metaphysics.
In either case, the presence of continuous diversity of ideas and people naturally motivates the need for a clear boundary, requiring someone to enforce it, and reinforcing the notion that the line’s justification is always (at least partly) arbitrary.
If we circle back to the notion that our human experience seems to center around a perception of continuity, it just might be apt to draw the conclusion that our existential perception of the emergence of "self" is equally arbitrary. Every moment has some capacity for evolutionary ascendancy; each decision or action, all externally affected experiences, every single activation of a single neuron within our brains, and each and every damaged nucleotide within our DNA. Anything can create change significant enough to make us believe a new modus operandi has emerged—one that forever, even if arbitrarily, alters how we perceive ourselves.
Comments
Post a Comment