Human Dignity and Bioethics

94 | Robert P. Kraynak
everything—including the laws of nature, the formation of space and
time, and the formation of matter and energy. Cosmologists admit
that what happened “in the beginning” is in principle a mystery because
it is beyond science to comprehend; what they resist is calling it
the miracle of a mysterious power because this too implies God as the
Creator. Furthermore, the appearance of rational beings such as man
at the top of a hierarchy of living beings, capable of rationally analyzing
the process, appears to be the result of self-organizing complexity
rather than a mindless accident, as Paul Davies argues. Yet rationality
as a primary feature of matter and of the universe is itself mysteriously
selected. Because the Bible presents the creation of the world and
the creation of man at the top of a hierarchy as the mysterious acts
of a still more mysterious power, and because science properly done
points toward these mysteries, it is both scientific and reasonable to
place faith and trust in the Bible’s teaching about man’s dignity as
an embodied rational soul made in the image of God. Belief in the
Imago Dei is thus more reasonable than Daniel Dennett’s completely
unjustified leap of faith.
The second question about Dennett’s analysis is easier to answer
than the first: Dennett offers nothing to replace the traditional doctrine
of the human soul as the distinguishing feature of human beings
and the foundation of our essential humanity. He claims that
natural science can find a substitute for the soul-doctrine but offers
no new grounding. At most, Dennett appeals to the social conventions
of a liberal democratic society or a pragmatic test, like the late
Richard Rorty’s appeal to historical contingency: we in modern liberal
democratic societies act in such a way as to respect human dignity
by not desecrating human corpses, for example, so pragmatically
it works for us. In other words, respecting human dignity is a social
convention of our times in the modern Western world. But this is patently
inadequate because it simply means living off the moral capital
accumulated by the Judeo-Christian tradition. I conclude therefore
that Daniel Dennett’s leap of faith from materialism to ethical idealism
is not only rationally unjustified, it also points toward genuine
religious faith as the logical path to the beliefs that he and others so
ardently cherish.