As a second tease of what my the book I’m attempting to write will be about, see the picture of the books that goes along with this post. I pulled these all off the “human identity” shelf in my office. I haven’t read them all cover to cover, but more than half of them I have. And the others I’ve sampled enough to get the gist. These are all books that tell a big story about what it means to be human. They often tell that story through the lens of one particular capacity we have: language, bipedality, emotions, imagination, etc. I really enjoy these kinds of books that synthesize a lot of different information and make a compelling case about the kind of creatures we are.
But I almost always feel like they’re missing an important part of our story. Most of these books don’t acknowledge a spiritual dimension to our existence, or if they do, it is something that has to be explained away — like why we have an appendix or get goose bumps. I want to take that spiritual dimension seriously. The book is not going to be preachy or the kind of evidential apologetics that thinks you can argue people into being Christians. But I like the Judeo-Christian language that calls humans the image bearers of God. And so I’m trying to tell a story about we became creatures that are capable of being God’s image bearers. And if I tell that story well, it just might show some people that taking science seriously does not mean that we have to think our spiritual capacities are just epiphenomena or spandrels (and of course telling the story well will mean explaining what those are!).
In fact, I expect to go beyond merely saying that the evolutionary explanation of our history is compatible with our being God’s image bearers. Mere consistency is a pretty low bar these days. Instead, I’m going to try to show that evolution is the best way to bring about creatures like us — that God couldn’t have just snapped the divine fingers and made us appear as morally mature creatures.
But all this sounds like it is going to be a dry academic book. I hope instead that it’s a page turner! There will be some science, and some philosophy, and some theology. But all that will come out of stories about our species, and hopefully some stories about the adventures I’m about to embark on.
So I guess the tease is: what kind of book do you get after reading all these books, not disputing their science, but thinking there is something more to us that the science doesn’t explain, and you go off on a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts… that’s the the book I’m hoping to write.
I'm eager to read the book!
Well, you have really piqued my interest! I am looking forward to your book!