The Western Classical Corpus insists that humans are body and soul – which distinguishes the species from every other living thing whether plant or animal. If it were true that all reality can be explained merely by biological processes, Christianity would face an existential crisis in arguing that man is special. But the pure materialist cannot defend his position in light of human behavior throughout generations.
Aristotle elevated man above the rest of creation because of his rational faculty. Meanwhile, certain atheist philosophers such as Alexander Rosenberg have proposed that biology alone can explain man’s nature. In response to this materialist thesis, Robert Sokolowski of The Catholic University of America published in 2006 “Soul and the Transcendence of the Human Person,” which sheds a fresh light on the disagreement.
He intuitively argues against materialism using examples of human thought in action. He mentions speech and drama, as well as “[m]athematical formulas, recipes for food, machines, furniture, clothing, flags, [and] political actions” as expressions only a spiritual being could produce. Sokolowski makes a clever point.
Each of his above examples requires an immaterial idea to be what they are. A wooden apparatus is only “furniture” if it is intended for its particular household function, a random piece of cloth is only clothing if it is intended to cover the body. A recipe, though composed of ink and paper, likewise expresses an immaterial concept: directions for food preparation. All these material items have an immaterial telos, or purpose instilled by their creator. A creation reflects the nature of its creator, so humans must have an immaterial nature if they have the ability to create other things with immaterial significance.
To be fair, some of Sokolowski’s examples of spiritual reality — especially speech, the existence of machines, and political actions — serve clear earthly ends, and an end is greater than the means that achieve it. Since speech, machines, and political actions serve the ends of biological survival, the materialist could argue that these things are merely material. Put simply, humans are biological masses who devise material strategies to survive. This would falsely assume, however, that speech, machines, and politics serve exclusively material ends with no regard for man’s intellectual and spiritual needs.
On the other hand, birds communicate through song, chimpanzees use primitive tools, and lions form hierarchical herds. Are humans merely a more complicated version of animals? Did they just take the fast track of evolution? Perhaps even man’s ability to act for the good of another (a basic definition of love) could be explained in terms of evolutionary selfishness. Man’s advanced brain — so argues the materialist — lets him consciously see the long term benefit for himself if other humans in his community flourish.
This evolutionary assumption ironically reveals man’s spiritual nature, for there is a part of man that screams for continuation in non-material matters. Man’s existence depends on immaterial goods beyond food, drink, shelter, and reproduction.
To use Sokolowski’s argument, why else would authors write and produce plays that provoke non-utilitarian pleasures? If man only acts to continue his existence, man’s self-expression in the form of “impractical” artistic works like sculptures for posterity to look back on indicates that evolution recognizes the continuation of the person independent of biological life.
The materialist view of evolution can explain many occurrences, but it cannot explain human devotions that serve no directly logical role in the continuation of the biological species. Preferring your grandmother’s worn-out prayer book to a new one, shedding tears in worship, accepting martyrdom in service of a deity, and sacrificing bodily needs and safety to be a missionary to those outside your own community are wastes of biological energy from the materialist evolutionary standpoint. As Sokolowski suggests in his work, the existence of religion pounds the nail in the coffin of the reductive materialist hypothesis.
Those who are nonreligious, whether consciously or not, also recognize the limited boundaries of the materialist explanation of human nature. People will spend fortunes to purchase famous paintings that are wholly unnecessary from a biological standpoint, yet they consider such investments worthwhile to respond to their human need for beauty. Nearly every person will tell you that watching an orange sunset on a summer night enhances one’s life, though staring at a color palette is quite low on the totem pole of species-preserving activities.
If living things care only about propagating their own species, there would be no need to bury your relatives from previous generations, or sacrifice yourself for a deity outside your species. Humans, the most advanced of earthly life, are the only earthly entities that willingly exchange their own life or enjoyment for those outside their frame of material reference. Humans are not just a more complicated version of animals because humans, unlike brute life, can love others and consciously sacrifice for them— independent of material evolutionary forces.
In the most desperate of situations, men have turned to prayer or suicide, consciously seeking aid from an immaterial force or seeking to escape the material realm itself. If humankind has so consistently reached outside the bounds of material life when material solutions have failed, pure materialism has left us loose ends. And if there was any wisdom in evolution, it wouldn’t have let the most advanced beings make such a foolish mistake.
In every brushstroke of a painting, every prayer whispered in the dark, and every sacrifice made for love, we find the evidence: humans are not merely matter but beings with a spiritual essence, reaching beyond the material to the eternal.
