so is gifted with reason, moral freedom, and, as a corollary to that freedom, conscience; consequently, and as the practical dimension of the imago Dei, humankind is given a mandate to care for and develop the creation and to represent in its midst the generous and loving lordship of God; and both authority and power are bestowed on man and woman to carry out that mandate. Surely much in the modern age is a fulfillment of this biblical revelation, presented under the form of myth.
Indeed it is. Western civilization has a great deal to be justly proud of. Its achievement of democracy and political freedom and representation, along with a widely generalized concern with and possibility of economic advancement and social well-being, is, though incomplete and flawed to a considerable extent in practice, unique in human history and rightly the wonder and envy of the world. But simultaneously, alongside this modern growth, a counterfeit has grown up, a lookalike weed whose seed may be found by inverting my last formulation (“. . . a fulfillment of this biblical revelation, presented under the form of myth.”) to read: “. . . a fulfillment of this biblical myth, presented under the form of revelation.” The modern mind considers divine revelation to be a mythical category, using the word “mythical” in a nontechnical sense as meaning simply “untrue.” But the grounds for ruling out the possibility and reality of divine revelation are rationalistic, not rational. It is not the brief or competence of science to evaluate what Christian theology calls revelation, but science’s own counterfeit, scientism, has presumed to do just this and has judged revelation to be a specious and outdated religious category.
Western philosophy since Hume and Kant has had the same presumption.25 It works from within a subject-object schema that gives absolute priority to the subject; while disallowing or at least severely limiting the possibility of objective knowledge, it sees the subject as able nevertheless, from within its own finitude, to posit the nature of reality—including that ultimate reality which, we are told, it is actually impossible for him to know. The fountain of Cartesian thought, which characterizes the thinking subject as the epistemological starting point and sets it over against and basically disconnected from the physical world, became, with Kant’s a priori categories, a powerful river that romanticism and the relativizing forces of historicism subsequently extended across a wide valley floor, ending in the submersion of the whole land under modern subjectivism.
But Kant’s disproof, through his antinomies, of the possibility of obtaining metaphysical knowledge by theoretical reason—a disproof that ever since has cast a shadow on Christian faith and made it seem unlikely that the personal God Christians believe in is anything more than a speculative projection—has in fact nothing whatsoever to say about the possibility of divine revelation being given to man, if a personal God exists who wishes to reveal himself. Ironically, Kant’s arguments are actually a philosophical equivalent to theological arguments against natural theology and the pretension that finite and unholy man, by himself, can rise up to a knowledge of the true, infinite, and holy God without that God having first to come down to him in revelation.
The locus of philosophical activity today is no longer the question of whether it is possible to have knowledge of objects outside the self, but rather the position of absolute perspectivalism, according to which all perceptions and assertions (apart from mathematical, logical, and scientifically demonstrable statements), being made by a subject and being therefore necessarily subjective and under the constraint of arbitrary signs/words (which cannot correspond in any objective sense to the objects they stand for), are unable to make contact with truth external to the perceiving, asserting subject. The conclusion is not far behind, of course, that no such truth exists. Hermeneutics has taken over epistemology. Relativistic perspectivalism is the latest form of skepticism. It is my conviction that a renewed appreciation of the biblical teaching about the imago Dei can be a powerful response to the dangers facing Western society today, and provide an underpinning to the doctrine of human rights we seek rightly to apply more widely, while at the same time keeping this doctrine from becoming itself an exploited and exploiting ideology.
V
Imago Dei: Man is a Creature Ontologically Related to God; M. Behe: Irreducibly Complex Systems; C. Tresmontant: Human Beings as Substances/Psychic Entities/Persons; the Irrational Human Project of Self-creation
“So God created man [humankind] in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female, he created them” (Gen 1:27). In the short space of this essay, we cannot possibly deal with all the complexities and implications of this foundational biblical affirmation. We shall merely touch on a number of key aspects that seem especially pertinent in light of the foregoing reflections about the critical situation of humanity at the start of the twenty-first century.
This statement, without equivalent in any other culture, is understood within the Judeo-Christian context as the basic revelation from God of the truth about human beings. What is given as revelation must, of course, be considered and evaluated by reason, but reason must not overstep its limits by arbitrarily positing its superiority to revelation. Such a move will only lead reason into contradiction with itself when it rules out the possibility of revelation simply because it repudiates the possibility of certain knowledge being gained through metaphysical speculation. The two modes of knowing, or of knowing about, unmeasurable reality—divine revelation and human metaphysical speculation—are in no way equivalent. The exclusion by reason of the possibility of revelation is unreasonable and cannot be defended on rational grounds.
The core of the truth about man revealed here is that he (male and female) is a creature ontologically related to God. To say that a man or woman is, is to say that he or she is in relation to God. This is primary, ontological; qualitative descriptions of men and women made in the effort to articulate an adequate anthropology and that describe human beings as creatures having ontic qualities like rationality and freedom are secondary and properly follow this primordial affirmation. It is these qualities that make possible the expression of the relation of men to God, but the relation itself is prior.
Man is a creature. He is created. This is the first aspect of the doctrine of the imago Dei that we must examine. However the mystery of his evolution is to be understood, humankind, according to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, owes its existence to a Creator, a personal God, and not to chance, chance being understood here as the negation of an organizing intelligence. To posit chance as the ultimate source of all reality is to assert that the constituent elements necessary to the existence of beings have appeared randomly and come together over time and then produced living beings that have subsequently evolved through the mechanism of natural selection. The efficacy of natural selection as the operative force of evolution can, logically, have only two possible sources: a primordial organizing intelligence that has willed this to be the case, or chance. The assertion that chance must be the source of all form, order, and life in the universe, including the very process of natural selection operative in the evolution of living forms, begs the question of how natural selection itself came to be. Merely to assert that natural selection is the result of chance cannot even begin to address the obvious fact that natural selection has a teleological orientation that logically points to intentionality, not to chance.
The recent work of the biochemist Michael Behe seeks to show that irreducibly complex systems at the biochemical level—and, by extension, at higher levels—cannot have evolved gradually, by incremental mutations.26 The complexity of just one cell, without even mentioning biological structures involving more than one cell, involves webs of different, identifiable, immensely complex systems. An irreducibly complex system, Behe writes, is “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”27
Behe argues that traditional Darwinian theory which, to use a commercial image, deals in wholesale and not in retail goods, cannot account adequately for such systems, where every single protein has a definable role to play that is adapted to that of every other protein, all the roles being necessary to the operation of the system. A system must have a “minimal function” to be a candidate for natural selection, and
