More Than Carbon?
We're more than carbon and chemicals.
We are the image of the invisible.
- Thrice, Image of the Invisible (song)
These lyrics by Dustin Kensrue, frontman of the band Thrice and self-professed Christian, are interesting to consider in a Christian vs. Secular Humanism context. For many Christians when faced with challenges to their faith seem to imagine only a "nihilistic" alternative where all meaning and morality are lost. By losing faith in God (or becoming an Atheist), they fear human beings are reduced to nothing more "than carbon and chemicals", and therefore, can be carelessly treated as we please.
As one commenter on a recent video about an Atheist philosophy professor becoming a Christian (after falling in love with a Christian woman) said1:
A strictly reductive materialism, atheism or philosophical naturalism is nothing more than a culture of death and meaninglessness if you think about it rationally!!
Atheism basically says birth is an accident, life is meaningless and absurd and death simply ends the absurdity and illusion that birth began!!
However, many of us who have made the journey from Christianity to a comprehensively Secular worldview, like Humanism, know that such a total loss of meaning does not inherently follow from it. Instead, in hindsight, we can see that this particular "nihilism" is not the result of a secular worldview or being an atheist in and of itself - but the result of looking at life and the world through a broken but still otherwise theistic one: morality/hope/meaning/purpose revolving around God - (minus only) belief in that God = worldview lacking morality/hope/meaning/purpose. Frederich Nietzsche described the issue similarly when he wrote:
“When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.” (Twilight of the Idols)2
I experienced something similar when I left my Christian faith to become an "Atheist" for a brief 6 month period at age 19. During that time, I had questioned and rejected belief in God - but unconsciously still had a theistic understanding of meaning and morality in life overall. In other words, my sense of a larger story for humanity and myself within it... sources of identify, hope, meaning and purpose... were all only well developed in my mind from a theistic perspective alone.
In a rather aimless period of dread, I would know first hand the life of existential and ethical nihilism I had previously feared when encountering doubts or criticism about my faith. And the experience would ultimately leave me longing for what I'd lost (e.g. to be a better and happier person again). I would take this as "experiential proof" that Christianity must be the true way of life after all. And I'd return to my Christian faith determined to figure out how I'd "lost my way."
I'd only depart form my Christian faith again 5-6 years later after inadvertently imagining more fully how one could approach life meaningfully from a secular point of view (i.e. Secular Humanism). This evolution was unexpected given the evangelistic purposes I had in mind at the time, thinking that "imagining" myself in a "non-Christian" shoes would help me better understand how to reach them with the Gospel (1 Cor. 9:22b). Ironically, the resulting shift in thinking ultimately set me up for the type of "total conversion" to a fully secular worldview that has sustained me now - not for a mere six months, like my prior partial theistic-deconversion into "Atheism" - but 18 years and counting.
Returning to the Christian lyrics above, it's obvious that describing humanity with such cold and technical terms as "carbon and chemicals" does not capture or express what we human beings mean to ourselves and to one another. For expressing such emotional sentiments obviously has nothing to do with the limited and focused purpose of such scientific terminology. In general, the scientific method seeks to take human bias and emotion out of the equation where possible to help us more objectively pursue the truth.
Nevertheless, belief in using Science as a great tool of humanity does not cut us off from - or inhibit - our ability to simultaneously live from the whole of our humanity in general. With this additional tool in hand, we yet remain very much the social and emotional creatures that we fundamentally are. Nor does it cut us off from expressing ourselves in every way that the full range of human language and culture allows. On the contrary, thinking carefully about what is objectively true is just one tool in our toolbox for living well as the subjective creatures we remain.
For example, many Atheists and Humanists also enrich our lives by using our imaginations and "suspending disbelief" regularly for the sake of subjectively meaningful human experiences - such as every time we take a seat in a dark movie theater, read a fantasy novel or play a video game. We have not, by embracing science and skepticism, become robotic truth machines or a Vulcan-like sub-species of humanity that suppresses all human emotion (as if that were even possible). Humanists do not - as a general rule - scold their children for playing make-believe or refuse to read them fictional stories at bedtime. Despite such practical observations, this fear of so called "scientism" is still seen often in culture and rightfully-mocked for its imagined absurdity.
Religiously, I'm speaking on the science 'cause
We've gotta live on science alone
I'll tell you what, mathematically, I'm having it
I want to live on science alone (The Dandy Warhols, I Am A Scientist)
But for many of us actually living a secular worldview, this is a strawmanning of our view and experience. After all, living well and the shared goal of human flourishing (which ecologically requires the flourishing of other things too, science tells us), is the goal of the secular worldview that is Secular Humanism. Yes, we believe that science and skepticism are humanity's best tools for learning what is true. But it in no way follows from this that we should also hold that human flourishing more broadly equates to our strictly living as objective truth-machine robots! Science is a tool made for humanity, not humanity a species created to achieve the ends of Science. Science is just a methodology, not a conscious entity with a will, intention or interests of its own (do we detect some Theistic projection here?). That's why science is just a tool and subject to our human purposes and not the other way around.
Yes, we very much care about the objective truth. Why? Because we first subjectively care - and have a vested interest in life - in general. Being subjective human beings having subjective human experiences while caring subjectively is foundational to our subjective interest in the objective truth in the first place!
Many life-long scientists are surely born of finding meaning in the subjective human experiences of curiosity, exploration, discovery, awe and wonder that pursuing the objective - or scientific truth - offers us. And it's not just the pursuit of truth that experientially offers rewarding subjective human meaning to us in this way. It is also the insights that such scientific pursuits yield that can offer us even more meaning and even inform our subjective sense of human identity.
"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars."
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." (Carl Sagan, Cosmos TV Series)3
Apparently, science tells us that we're made of the same material that was once stars. As part of the universe, our connection to it goes this deep. We are in this material sense both ancient and cosmic. And we might also combine this knowledge of our intimate connection to the Universe, like Sagan did, with our knowledge that we are conscious beings. Are we not, thereby, a part of the universe that is "awake" and experiencing itself? Indeed, drawing on science and observation, we can agree: humanity is more to us "than carbon and chemicals" and certainly more than what such cold technical terms alone inspire.
In his podcast, Humanize Me, Christian turned Secular Humanist counselor Bart Campolo has built on this subjective meaning drawn from science and observation by also saying that we are the part of the universe capable of caring and loving others within it (as well as ourselves, I might add). Now, by pursuing the truth meaningfully, are we not also empowered to care and love more truly - that is, more effectively? How can I love myself and others well if I don't understand accurately what effects you and I positively and negatively in the first place? And so, with both emotion and reason available to our nature, many of us are compelled to deeply care about the truth and its pursuit. Why? Because we deeply care - and love - that which the truth effects in the first place: conscious beings like you and me.
So why do Christians imagine the alternative that a secular worldview offers us must be "meaningless" in this way? I've already suggested this is largely a matter of many Christians' having an underdeveloped concept of what a secular worldview looks like from the inside-out for those actually living it in practice. Instead, Christians are often limited to projecting what a broken theistic worldview is imagined to look like onto ALL those who call themselves Atheists. This imagined worldview, it seems, can even involve Science and its "will" somehow replacing God at the top of one's hierarchy of values - instead of human well-being and flourishing holding that place, as it does for Humanists. Of course, this is a weakness - our ethnocentric inability to see things from a view outside our own cultural perspective - that we all possess to some degree or another regarding the worldview of others.
But might those of us who hold such secular worldviews also take some responsibility here? Perhaps what our worldview can offer being underdeveloped in some way or at least, perhaps under communicated? Unfortunately, the situation is evidently a bit worse and messier than mere outsider mis-perception alone. For some self-professed Atheists are truly "nihilistic" in their outlook. Like me at age 19, some may yet unknowingly have a broken theistic worldview haphazardly gutted at the God-shaped core. Are then not some "Atheists" not fully yet as free from Theism as they may think or proclaim to others? And might they be contributing to the fears of those who might otherwise consider departing Theism as well?
These are all questions I'd like to explore more in future articles. As I've noted previously, my shift in how I imagined a secular worldview was the key to my own conversion to Secular Humanism (where my own Christian deconstruction took me eventually). For anyone else that may benefit from the journey, I'd like to understand better how others might also explore this perspective sooner where desired and without as much fumbling in the dark as I. For as my experience suggests, not all exits from theism require passing through the dark valley of nihilism (surely, the broken theistic variety is avoidable). And this it seems is worth avoiding where possible given it may cause others - like it caused me - a season of dread, poor decision making and to eventually turn back to theism anyway. That and to stay there for years after, if not for others, a lifetime.
FOOTNOTES
(1) https://youtu.be/DnXYLvQL-24?si=Gz-uU3XB4P8LxWkS
(2) https://bigthink.com/thinking/what-nietzsche-really-meant-by-god-is-dead/
(3) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/144310-the-nitrogen-in-our-dna-the-calcium-in-our-teeth
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/484665-the-cosmos-is-within-us-we-are-made-of-star-stuff