In our high school Biology class, we spend much time defining the various types of life we encounter every day. This act emulates, in some fashion, the job Adam had in naming the creatures in the Garden of Eden. That is, Adam exercised his God-given lordship over creation to give the animals a proper place in language, and thus a proper place in human life and thought. Much of science today consists of that sort of classification. As we classify the various gifts we have from God in nature, we are better able to understand what place each has in our lives as Christians, how we as Christians should act regarding each gift, and what place we ourselves have in creation as human beings.
One large and important distinction we made at the beginning of the year (and continue to come back to) was the difference between levels of ontology, or levels of being. We set apart four different kinds of being in the world, each level building on the last. First is matter, which plays a part in the makeup of all created beings (excluding purely spiritual beings like angels). Something like a rock or a book falls under this category—it has no life, no will, and only material with some sort of shape. The second ingredient we could add is what in Greek is called bios, life (the word from which we get our word biology). Anything we consider to be “alive” and that has the possibility of being “dead” has bios. A rock can’t die, but a plant definitely can, soon to be proven by our impending winter weather. Both humans and animals have bios too; but that’s not all they have.
The third level of being is what makes the difference between a plant and an animal. Both live and die, but animals have the ability to think—at least, they can think in the sense that they know how to find food, play fetch, be fond of an owner, avoid pain, or seek pleasure. One thing animals can’t do, however, is reason. Smaug the bearded dragon may get very excited when I crack open the cricket bin, but he doesn’t contemplate why he is getting crickets, whether he deserves them, or when he’ll get more. All these types of thoughts are reserved for the fourth and final level of being: human being.
This final distinction is where we as Christians must draw a hard line with the pagans of our day, who would have our children believe they are no more dignified than chimpanzees. On the contrary, humans are much more. We are body-and-soul beings; we have the gift of language (and therefore, reason); we are made in God’s image. We Christians also have a unique view of human beings because we know Christ. That is, we know that God Himself came down to earth and became what we are. He took on the human type of being—and not just on a whim, but rather with the express purpose of justifying the whole human race.
We see, then, how important the Gospel is to the study of biology, particularly human biology. Without it, all the shameful trampling over human life so prevalent in the world makes harrowing scientific sense: if we can run psychological experiments on rats, why not on students? If people can put down their pets, why not their unborn children? Thank God for keeping us in His Word, where lies like those are utter foolishness. We know the truth that we are made in God’s image, that we are justified by Christ, and that as Christians we are buried with Christ and raised to life with Him in our Baptism. That kind of life is not mere bios; it’s eternal life, won for us by Jesus on the cross and continually delivered to us through His Word and Sacraments. With that truth as a foundation, we can happily go about studying biology knowing that, although we do share in that bios type of being, our life is much more than even human reason can ponder.
In Christ,
Mr. Hahn
