What on earth is man?

This question has to conclude the sequence of other questions, none of which are either answered or, typically, even posed by natural science.

What is consciousness? What is thought? What is a mind? What is innate moral sense? What is love? Because such questions are metaphysical they demand metaphysical answers.

Historically, there have been many options, but over the past few centuries they’ve noticeably boiled down to two. Each, however, is an umbrella covering multiple gradations; each can act as the starting point of our life’s choices.

The first metaphysical premise is Christian, or Judaeo-Christian if you’d rather: we were created by God in His image. This makes man qualitatively different from all other animals.

Man alone was singled out to fulfil a mission assigned by God. Since this mission is eternal, it doesn’t end with physical death. Thus, there is no such thing as a happy ending to one’s life. If it’s to be happy, it’s not the ending.

The second metaphysical premise is materialist: the living cell, which over billions of years was to become man, appeared as a biochemical accident of some kind, we aren’t quite sure which. A man lives his three-score and ten or whatever and then becomes fertiliser. In that he is no different from other living organisms, though while still alive he is cleverer than most.

We may choose one metaphysical premise or the other, but the choice won’t stay merely theoretical for long. Metaphysics has far-reaching practical ramifications, affecting, for example, our economic behaviour.

Though, compared to eternity, our existence on earth is risibly short, every little thing we do may mould our life in infinity – a daunting thought. Yet it’s also a glorious thought: life will never end. It will only be transformed into a different kind of life and, if we don’t mess up too badly while still here, it’ll be blissfully happy. There is death in life, but then there is also life in death.

Thus our economic activity, though variously important, can’t become all-important. If it does, we’ll run into many moral dilemmas that will surely gore us with their horns.

Yes, we want to live without much deprivation, we’d rather be reasonably comfortable while still on earth – but only if the pursuit of such comfort doesn’t jeopardise our life in eternity.

If, on the other hand, we believe that our life starts at birth and ends at death, then we may act in a different way. Our lives will be committed not to serving an outside authority infinitely higher than ourselves, but only to satisfying our own passions.

If our existence is an accident ending in death, then, illogically, it’s the process of life that is its highest meaning. The aim then is to squeeze as much as possible out of every moment.

Any self-limitation of appetites becomes illogical. Anything that restricts one’s pleasures goes against the essence of one’s life.

The polarity of good and bad is replaced by useful and useless. The worst sin stops being sinful if it brings much pleasure. (Hemingway, for example, put ‘daemon’ into eudaemonia : “What is moral is what you feel good after.”). And since what we’ll define as the best things in life are far from free, we’ll have to pursue aggressively the happiness expressible in money.

How do people choose their metaphysical premise? Neither theists nor atheists can claim scientific rigour and irrefutable proof. Neither of them observed the root processes, meaning that both have to proceed from a hypothesis they believe is true.

Thus, the opposition of the two metaphysical poles isn’t one between religion and science but between two faiths. One of them is based on God’s revelation given by methods both natural (through the possibility of perceiving much of His creation experimentally) and supernatural (through the Scripture and church tradition). The other is based on nothing but man’s own speculation. As such, it’s not even so much faith as superstition.

Even scientists declaring themselves to be atheists, and trying to use science to vindicate their atheism, nonetheless start from the metaphysical premise of accepting the existence of rational and universal natural laws. If they wish to be logical, then, while rejecting the existence of a rational and universal law-giver, they are forced to ascribe rational behaviour to nature itself.

That’s the most primitive pantheism, discarded as serious thought centuries ago. Strip their claims bare of scientific cant, and they descend to the intellectual level of a prehistoric shaman.

It would be foolhardy to deny that, whichever metaphysical option we may choose, we are guided in our choice by emotional need, not just a cold-blooded weighing of intellectual pros and cons. But theocentric metaphysics offers much greater rewards in either area.

The idea of having been created and guided through life by a loving, merciful and self-sacrificial God sounds more emotionally appealing than the notion of man’s descent from a single-cell organism via an unsavoury mammal that looks like a ghastly caricature of a human being. And intellectually, a thinker who starts from the theocentric premise will be able to explain next to everything that matters, while his anthropocentric counterpart will explain next to nothing.

The choice of a metaphysical premise starts from an intuitive predisposition, but then so does any search we undertake. A scientist knows intuitively where truth lies before he embarks on his experiments. He calls this knowledge ‘hypothesis’ rather than ‘faith’, but that’s a distinction without a difference. A Christian may ascribe his intuition to divine grace, but that simply indicates how he came by his intuitive hypothesis, aka faith.

If a man’s intuition leads him to the materialist metaphysical premise, he relinquishes the right to ask what Dostoyevsky called “the accursed questions”, of the kind I posed at the beginning.

That is, he may ask, but he’ll never come up with even remotely satisfactory answers. If he insists that man is just so many atoms arranged in a recognisable shape, and that man’s thought is merely a discharge of electrical impulses, he’ll only succeed in sounding childish.

Such a man puts a voluntary ceiling on his thought, allowing it to rise so high but no higher. He may still be supremely intelligent, but his mind will never dare rise above the ground. If he does try to gatecrash the area reserved for the first metaphysical premise, he’ll sound inadequate no matter how erudite and bright he may be in all other areas.

This observation vindicates Jacques Maritain (d. 1973) who argued for a hierarchy of sciences. Natural science was to him but a subset of philosophy, with the latter deferring to the overarching science of theology. Messrs Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, Newton, Leibnitz, Maxwell, Gauss, Heisenberg and most other great minds of history would have agreed with him.

I tend to regard atheism as a lamentable failure of intellect and imagination. Yet God tells us not to despise such people, but to love them and pray that they are released from their self-imposed confinement. And if this is what God says, we must listen – especially during this season.