Breakpoint
Author: John Stonestreet, Dr. Timothy D. Padgett and Abdu Murray
Culture is downstream from anthropology. What we think about human beings—who they are, their value, their nature, their purpose—forms how we think about society, including our definition of a healthy, flourishing society. In his talk at the Colson Center National Conference, apologist and author Abdu Murray described how our shifting view of human nature has affected so many other things in our culture.
Here’s Abdu:
We had this thick, beautiful, robust idea of what it meant to be human. But over the course of some centuries, we began to under-spiritualize and over-psychologize what it meant to be human. We shaved some layers off this idea of the soul, and we had this semi-robust idea of the self. The self is still somewhat communal, and it's somewhat transcendent in one way, but it's more about, “How does the outside world affect my psyche,” and then, “How does what happens to my psyche affect how I affect other people?”
The idea of “the soul” became less communal, horizontally, and vertically and became more inwardly driven and more skull-centered. Over the course of the decades of recent vintage, we began to take this idea of the self and shave off layers of that. So we got thinner and thinner and thinner, and now we have this unbiblical idea of “identity.”
Our identities are no thicker than the bumper stickers we slap on the back of our Subarus to announce our political opinions. But because of the fragility of that idea of identity, and any criticism of it or challenge to our opinions becomes an existential threat. We can be blown about just like leaves are blown by the wind.
With that fragility, we are now encountering what I'm calling a cultural schizophrenia: We are being told two competing claims. We're told that these two competing claims are actually both true at the same time, even though they contradict each other. But we're required to believe both, and, therefore, leave the reconciliation of the contradiction as a mystery.
The first claim is this: You are a machine. That's what you are. You're just a machine. You have the illusion of consciousness. You have the illusion of free will. You have the illusion of morality. But really what's going on is just neurons firing and synapses and neurotransmitters and electrical impulses in your brain. You are just a machine that reacts to external stimuli as every other machine does.
Richard Dawkins was famous for saying we are simply machines for propagating DNA. We’re just a machine that reacts to external stimuli just like every other machine does. It is every living object's sole reason for living.
The competing claim is the exact opposite. You are God. You are the god of your own skull-sized world. We're in a post-truth culture now, where feelings and preferences are elevated above facts and truths. And so, you can determine and design your own reality and determine even what you are based on your feelings and your preferences. So everything becomes skull-centered once again. No matter what your body happens to be or reality happens to be, it must adapt according to your preferences.
So, you're God and you're a machine. The problem is you can't be both. In fact, the reality is you're neither. But you certainly can't be both, though you’re required to believe both things at the same time. Both things are being foisted upon us at the exact same time with the exact same ferocity.
It’s no wonder then that young people—and we've seen the data on this, as we're trying to bounce between these two things—that young people are now the most anxious generation because the human mind craves coherence. When it receives this contradictory message and its inability to reconcile those two things, at some point, young people, and all people really, but young people especially, simply have a learned helplessness that sets in. They give up, and then they are defined by whatever happens to be popular. And that's how you get social contagions.
That was Abdu Murray. To hear more of this talk and get access to every talk from this year’s Colson Center National Conference, visit colsoncenter.org/august.