“[T]hen the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
Genesis 2:7
“Good evening, good evening,” said the Faun. “Excuse me—I don’t want to be inquisitive—but should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?”
C. S. LEWIS, the lion, the wtich, and the wardrobe
“My name’s Lucy,’ said she, not quite understanding him.”
Articles in this Series
See the first article for the list.
Daughter of Eve
Now would be a good time to reiterate that my reflections on Narnia will not be strictly exegetical. I will not be noticing everything Lewis may have wanted me to notice, and I may be commenting on things that Lewis did not intend to imply. As long as this is done responsibly and in moderation, I think this is quite fine. I mention all of this because I want to provide a few thoughts on the passage above, which occurs at the start of the second chapter of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. It is an incidental comment: Lucy did not understand what Mr. Tumnus meant by “Daughter of Eve”. I do not know if what I will say here is what Lewis intended.1 Nevertheless, I chose to highlight this because in modern times, due to belief in Darwinian evolution, society no longer considers humanity as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve; rather, we are the mere product of naturalistic mechanisms. I will argue here that this is not without consequence.
To launch instantly into a drastic example, take the comments of Peter Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton. In a section on his website about commonly asked questions, he responds to a question asking whether he would rather save a mouse or a human being from a fire. He says: “Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being. But not because the human being is human, that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens. Species membership alone isn’t morally significant, but equal consideration for similar interests allows different consideration for different interests.” This comment is already significant enough: he does not say “in all cases” but “in almost all cases”. I am not sure whether Singer means that there would be one case where he rescues the mouse over the human, but that is not my primary focus here. Note what Singer says next; the reason that he would save the human is “not because the human being is human” because just being part of a species “isn’t morally significant”.
What is Singer’s alternative? On Singer’s view, we ought to take into account the “interests” of particular entities or “qualities that are ethically significant”. He goes on to list such qualities like “a capacity to experience something… a capacity to feel pain, or to have any kind of feelings”, “whether a being is the kind of being who can see that he or she actually has a life”, and “the greater extent of grief and distress that, in most cases, the family of the human being will experience, as compared with the family of the mouse”. Regarding the last point, he considerately notes with loving deference to the rodent community that “we should not forget that animals… can have close ties to their offspring and mates”.2 We would not want to offend any animals by insinuating that their relationships are less significant, of course.
I want to focus on this quote primarily, though elsewhere on the same page, he argues that infanticide, in some cases, is morally permissible. The same rationale applies to abortion, euthanasia, etcetera. I could address those areas, but the underlying principles for the quote in the above paragraph and Singer’s thoughts on infanticide or abortion are really the same. The principle is found in how Singer justifies his desire to save the human not because the human is part of the human race but because of certain listed qualities, which boil down to the capacity to feel hurt or other emotions, being able to understand that you exist, and the anguish inflicted on your family. There are likely more qualities. He argues, based on these principles, that we ought to save the human rather than the mouse. To clarify what I meant by the same underlying principle just above, the theory underlying these principles, namely personhood theory, is the same. In order to have value, you must be a “person”, with the related qualities that render one a person. The baby in the womb is not a person, one may claim, because “it” is dependent on “its” mother. You can think of other examples.
A simple response would be to ask Singer whether he would save the mouse instead in a hypothetical situation wherein the human has less psychological function than a mouse (perhaps due to being in a coma), the human cannot understand their own existence (perhaps due to being a newborn baby), and the human has no family and friends to grieve his or her death but the mouse has a large extended family who will mourn with mouse-sized sackcloth and ashes. In this case, where the mouse satisfies all of Singer’s criteria to a greater extent than the human, ought we not save the mouse?
In response to my contention here, it could be urged that other criteria not stipulated by Singer could serve in my hypothetical scenario to justify prioritising the human over the mouse. This response may be correct: we could add other criteria that exclude the mouse being saved in every scenario. We could revise our personhood theory. But I think a more fundamental assertion is being made with my hypothetical situation. The fundamental point is this: when arbitrary factors are prioritised over the rigid foundation of the Christian worldview, these factors are always susceptible to being reduced into incoherence. Again, it would not hurt to stress that this applies in the immediate context to Singer’s answer concerning the mouse and the human and to other related debates about abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, and other cultural topics.3
Though Singer may give increasingly nuanced factors that qualify someone to be a “person”, the reality is that we live in God’s world, being made in His image (Gen. 1:27) and that it is the fact that we are image-bearers that grant us essential value (Gen. 9:6). Our value is not found in arbitrary, accidental, contingent properties that render it possible for us to gain or lose personhood, as the abortion, euthanasia, or infanticide supporters would claim; it is found in the fact that the hands of God Almighty knitted us together (Ps. 139:13-16). To ground our value in a list of properties that one may or may not meet is rebellion against God; it is to usurp to Creator’s right to grant value and replace it with our own whimsical and fickle reasoning. It is to create our own standard of right and wrong, relying upon our own autonomous reasoning, and it is a manifestation of suppressing the truth in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18). Eventually, God gives us over to this rebellion, withdrawing his restraining hand and retracting His common grace (Rom. 1:28). So, our society has become “full of… murder” (Rom. 1:29). Our society “know God’s righteousness decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, [though] they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Rom. 1:30).
What should be our response? It ought to be a bold proclamation of this very fact: God’s world is God’s world, and it is not our own. Therefore, it is not for us to decide what constitutes a person or the criteria that render someone valuable, for that is the sole prerogative of the Almighty Creator. We ought to realise, along with Mr. Tumnus, that we are Daughters of Eve and Sons of Adam, and hence that the same image they were made in belongs to us too. We ought to proclaim this fact with uncompromising zeal, and we ought to live in accordance with this fact in our everyday lives. We are not the mere product of naturalistic forces, nor do we lose value upon reaching a certain physical or mental state. We are God-breathed creatures, moulded clay, living dust, and seated with Christ in the heavenly places (Eph. 2:6). This Biblical paradox trumps the idolatrous cacophony of secular ethics. The Lion’s breath melts the frigid chill of an ideology that states humans are not inherently valuable.
Previous Article – Part One: Welcome to the Wardrobe
Next Article – Part Three: The Bad Faun
Footnotes
- He certainly did not mean to imply that Lucy was somehow culpable and neither do I.
- See https://petersinger.info/faq for all the quotes in this paragraph.
- See Nancy Pearcey’s Love Thy Body for more. Pearcey is an excellent apologist, refuting the dichotomising nature of personhood theory. My quote from Singer is just one example of personhood theory.