Twitter is a wild place. Depending on how you structure it, it can be a place where your worldview is affirmed or challenged or both. My worldview is distinctly Judeo-Christian, but my training as an academic is decidedly secular. There is tension there that keeps me on my philosophical toes. I follow a wide variety of people who hold to multiple perspectives about the meaning and purpose of life, work, and the self. The turn from 2021 to 2022 illustrated just how diverse and conflicting worldviews can be.
Two tweets, posted 25 hours apart, are so opposed that I shook for a minute as I began to process their implications. The first, by a brilliant academician, claimed that “the individual is a social construct.” The second, by a brilliant preacher, asked, “what does it mean to be a human?” Side by side, the two comments represent what I believe is the primary difference between secular and sacred worldviews.
The idea that to be a human is not to be a unique entity in the evolution of the universe is the foundation of the post-modern, post-structural, post-human philosophy. If humans are simply a collection of material particles, then humans are of no more importance than the tree in the forest, the bird in the sky, or the fish in the ocean. It could be argued, then, that humans are of lesser value because as a species humans tend to destroy and consume more than they build and provide.
Post-humanism, a direct descendent of post-modernism, eliminates the individual as an “autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional” actor in the universe. Instead, all humans are “physically, chemically, and biologically enmeshed and dependent on the environment…made up of a larger evolving ecosystem (Keeling & Lehman, 2018)1. According to postmodernism, human individuals participate in change but are not sole agents of change. Everything humans do is a result of being part of a greater ecology of living and non-living particles of what Bennett (2010) called “vibrant matter.”2
Most rational people dismiss this post-human view. If nothing else, humans have evolved into a higher life form than trees, birds, and fish. By what measure? Gee (2020)3 considers language to be the defining feature of humanity from the rest of the matter that makes up the cosmos. Others claim the ability to recognize good and evil is the signature of humanity.4 The BBC did a year-long documentary series called Being Human that explored “the awe of being alive and the thrill of discovering what it means to be us, the greatest wonder in the world” while at the same time admitting that humanity continues to ascend “into insignificance, becoming a vanishing footnote in space and time, a speck of dust in the vastness of the universe.”5 Most people believe that humans are different than other living things, but a post-modern culture and a post-human elite confuse the issue until there is no clear answer to what being human actually means.
If being human is up for debate, then certainly individual members of humanity are diminished, even to the point of being considered a social construct instead of biological reality.
I suspect many academics will support the idea that being individual is a social construct based on the human need for interaction and relationships. Donne (1624)6 wrote, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me.” The problem with that notion is that it ignores Donne’s thesis: awareness of the sufferings and deaths of individuals should cause all individuals to consider their own mortality and relationship with God. C.S. Lewis (1940)7 likely drew from that concept in his book, The Problem of Pain, where he argued that pain is God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (p 91). Pain and death remind individual humans that, although they are separate entities, they are also part of a community of other individuals.
What academia scoffs, however, is the possibility that human individuals are unique, not just from other matter in the universe, but from each other as well. Community is a key element to the human experience, but it does not define the human being.
The Judeo-Christian worldview centers individuals in their relationship with a Creator. From the opening words of the Bible, God is the source of all matter and energy. Each new creation was “good,” until the final completing element: humans. Only then does God proclaim His work as “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Humans were created for a dual purpose: dominion over the rest of creation and a unique connection to the Creator (Genesis 1:26; 2:7; 3:8).
The Psalmist explained the magnitude of the individual’s place in creation:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.Psalm 8:3-8 (ESV)8
The Judeo-Christian worldview sees value in each individual, not as a form of vibrant matter or a social construct, but as a uniquely designed special creation of God, Himself. This worldview requires individuals to answer the question posited in the second tweet: what does it mean to be created in the image of God (Imago Dei) and how do we interpret the world around us through that lens, despite “AI, the metaverse, and various dystopian proclivities”?
Biblically, human beings are of more value than trees, birds, and fish. The “awe of being alive” is part and parcel of discovering an intimate relationship with the Creator of the universe. Individuals are called out and set apart for personal relationships with the Almighty. The same God whose fingerplay formed the cosmos knows each individual from the time of conception until dying day (Psalm 139:15-16). Nothing is hidden.
God’s gifts of intellect, creativity, emotion, reason, and feelings are at our disposal. How we use them is an entirely individual choice. Some people choose to use those gifts for self-promotion, personal gain, and power plays. Individuals make choices about how they live their lives, for good or for ill. These decisions are not collectivist thoughts, nor are they merely instincts of matter and self-preservation as can be said of reptiles and fish. Humans are internally driven toward something outside themselves; they are not blown like a tree in the wind or a seed deposited by a bird in the sky.
“How should we then live?” Schaeffer asked (1976).9 He rightly noted that the loss of the Christian worldview in the public arena will elevate the elite, who promise to maintain the illusion of “personal peace and affluence” (227) while simultaneously constructing a “manipulative authoritarian government” (228). They will promise peace where there is no peace. They will redefine what it means to be individual by reducing people to the intersections of their various identity groups.
Christians must return to their Judeo-Christian worldview and act according to the dictates of Scripture, not culture. Only then will we be able to negotiate an increasingly secular, post-humanist society. Secular people must reconsider their views about what individuality means and return to the view that individuals are independent entities with the power to influence their social and political and educational circles.
There will always be tension between academic humanist/post-humanist and Christian worldviews. Navigating that tension requires attention to philosophy, ethics, values, and truth. It requires objectivity. It requires accountability. It requires intelligent and selfless use of the gifts and talents each individual has been given. It also requires rejecting “personal peace and affluence” (Schaeffer, 1976, 247) as the highest ideal of life.
Individuality celebrates the unique marks of each human. It is not a social construct; it is a reality that every person has a story based on history, experiences, personality, nature, and nurture. It is also a reality that every story is important and should be heard. With that, the conclusion must be that every person is important as a living breathing creation of God, Himself.
Keeling, Diane Marie, and Lehman, Marguerite Nguyen. (2018, April 26). Posthumanism. Oxford Research Encyclopedia.
Bennett, Jane. (2010). Vibrant matter; A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Gee, James G. (2020). What is a human? Springer Nature Switzerland.
Ventegodt, Soren; Andersen, Niels Jorgen; Kromann, Maximilian; Merrick, Joave. (2003, December, December 1). Quality of life philosophy 2: What is a human being? Scientific World Journal. DOI: 10.1100/tsw.2003.110
Donne, John. (1624). No man is an island. Devotions upon emergent occasions. Meditation 17. Public Domain.
Lewis, Clive Staples. (1940) The problem of pain. Harper Collins.
Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV) Text edition 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
Schaeffer, Francis A. (1976). How should we then live? Crossway.
Would it be fair to say that we’re not JUST a social construct. Because the impact of society, it’s hold on our rights and our lived experiences can not be dismissed nor diminished. It’s truly a building block, regardless of our faith. . . Or am i defining “construct” incorrectly within this context?