A Difference of Kind or Degree?
A Sacred Chain story
I’ve been running out of steam doing this self-promotion thing, but the release of my new book is now just one month from today. So I thought I’d pick up where I left off in part III: the challenge of species. If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that this challenge is how to think about us as humans if evolution is true: do we only differ from the other life on the planet by degrees? Or can we still say with Christian theology that human beings differ in kind from everything else, because we alone are God’s image bearers?
I like to start discussion of this topic with two passages arguing opposite sides. First from Charles Darwin’s second-most-famous book, The Descent of Man:
There can be no doubt that the difference between the mind of the lowest man and that of the highest animal is immense. . . . Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, &c., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
We differ only by degrees. Small changes are made, and over time they add up to some remarkable differences in abilities and capacities between species, but they’re really the same kind of thing.
Second is from G.K. Chesterton, writing in 1925 soon after a striking ancient cave painting had been discovered in Spain. What did the art of these ancient cavemen or cavewomen say about us?
It must seem at least odd that [one] could not find any trace of the beginning of any arts among any animals. That is the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the coloured pictures; only it is too simple to be learnt. It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique.
Nothing else is remotely like us. Humans are a different kind of thing.
Who is right? Darwin or Chesterton? In the book I give an account my own journey to see some ancient cave art in Rouffignac, France. It was a remarkable experience to stand in a cavern, a kilometer from the surface, where someone (or a community of people?) about 15,000 years ago painted a bunch of mammoths on the cave walls. Here is Sloan’s recreation of one of the most famous ones in the cave:
That experience inclined me toward Chesterton’s view that we are a different kind of thing. But Darwin wasn’t wrong: we descended from common ancestors that also gave rise to other species, and it isn’t necessary to invoke anything magical for how that happened (in another section I talk about the difference between magic and the miraculous). So I haven’t yet answered the challenge of species. I was going to need another guide to help me sort this out. I found one among the trees.
My last name has always given me an affinity for trees (and something of an inferiority complex!), so one rainy day when I was in San Francisco for work, my wife and I went to visit Muir Woods National Monument, which is just a little north of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is one of the few places where old-growth coastal redwoods are still standing and relatively accessible.
It was an awe-inspiring experience. These trees were so huge, they seemed like a different kind of thing from the maples in my home town.
An evolutionary biologist friend had given an illustration about redwoods that helps to solve the challenge of whether things differ by degrees or kinds. He said, “Imagine that all the plants you’ve ever seen in the world were like rosebushes — just a couple of feet high. And then imagine that you came across a redwood towering hundreds of feet. You’d think they are a different kind of thing altogether. You could plot both of these on a graph, but the redwoods would be spectacular outliers to all the other plants.”
Being a spectacular outlier captures the both/and view of whether we are a difference in kind or degree from other animals. Even outliers share something with the others — they can be plotted on the same graph. But they are so remarkably different that it justifies calling them a different kind of thing. That’s what humans are compared to the other life.
Of course we share lots of characteristics with other life, and these developed by degrees over very long stretches of time. But the changes have amassed so much that we are spectacular outliers. We live in a very different world than does everything else.
In the next challenge — the challenge of the soul — I get talking about the different world we live in due to language.