Two Questions Nobody Can Escape

Everything happening in our culture right now eventually comes back to two unavoidable questions:

What does it mean to be human?
And where does morality come from?

In this episode, Shane Lingo explores why these questions matter so much for human dignity, justice, identity, meaning, and truth.

We talk about:

* objective morality
* human value and purpose
* C.S. Lewis and The Abolition of Man
* Viktor Frankl and the human search for meaning
* the image of God
* why modern culture feels increasingly fragmented
* and why worldview foundations matter more than we often realize

My goal with this episode isn’t just to argue for ideas—
it’s to help us think more deeply about what it means to be human and why any of this matters in the first place.

If you enjoy conversations about truth, culture, worldview, philosophy, and Christianity, make sure to subscribe for more episodes.

#Christianity #Worldview #Philosophy #Morality #Truth #CSLewis #ViktorFrankl #Culture #HumanNature #Meaning #Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Everything happening in our culture right now comes back to two questions that nobody can avoid. In other words, every political argument, every cultural debate, every identity crisis eventually runs into two fundamental questions. What does it mean to be human and where does morality come from? And here's the thing: if we can't answer these questions, we don't just lose arguments. We actually lose any foundation for humans having ultimate meaning, dignity, or worth at all. Because underneath every worldview is an answer to those two questions. And once you start realizing that, you begin to notice that these questions are everywhere. You know, people constantly talk about human rights, human dignity, justice, equality. But we have to stop and ask, why should humans have dignity at all? Right? And if morality is just kind of a personal preference or a social understanding, why should anyone actually obey it? And if humans are ultimately just highly evolved animals, like many people in our modern day believe, then in what sense is anything truly right or truly wrong? Because you see, regardless of what people claim to believe, most of us live as though certain things are really wrong. So not just socially unacceptable, not just personally offensive, but as if things are actually wrong. In other words, everybody, at least to some degree, lives with some sort of, you know, what we would call an objective moral standard. And the deeper question that we have to ask when it comes to this as we think about different worldviews is does their worldview actually support it? And I think that's one of the biggest tensions in our modern culture, because we talk constantly about human value while increasingly losing any shared understanding of what a human even is. You know, for many people today, humans are ultimately the product of these kind of unguided processes. Think of matter, chemistry, biology, really just a random collection of chemicals or some sort of advanced clump of cells. And William Lane Craig actually expresses this view really well in his book Reasonable Faith. He says this He says, on the naturalist view, there's nothing special about human beings. They're just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called planet Earth, lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. So in that view, consciousness, morality, meaning, even love are ultimately the result of just these physical processes and are really just something that we've kind of made up in order to prolong our life as a species. But if that's true, then again, we have to ask what grounds human dignity? What makes racism wrong? Why is cheating a bad thing? In other words, when someone does something that you would say is fundamentally wrong, like murder or torture, do you have a legitimate reason to be upset? You know, do we have a legitimate reason to call for justice? And this is where I think the conversation gets really interesting. And real quick, if you enjoy conversations like this, conversations about truth, culture, meaning, worldview, make sure to subscribe for more episodes because that's my goal. My goal here is to simply help this generation think well about topics like this. Now, with that said, here's what I find fascinating. Most people, even in a secular culture, still instinctively believe that humans possess this unique value. We at least act like humans matter in a way that rocks or trees or insects or other animals don't. Most of us still naturally live as though human beings possess this inherent value, which is why most of us can eat things like fish or chicken or, you know, good old Texas brisket and not be seen as completely crazy. It's why when uh cheetah chases down and kills a gazelle, we don't call that murder. Or why when a dolphin forcibly copulates with another dolphin, we we don't call that rape. We have this understanding that humans are valuable in a way that other creatures are not. And so the question is, is what actually grounds human value? What makes human beings distinct from every other form of life on this planet? And here's how I've come to think about it Part of what makes us human is not just intelligence or self-awareness or even emotion, although I would say all of these things are true of humans in a special way, but it's also our unique ability to seek things beyond instinct and self-preservation, things like truth and beauty and goodness, justice, love. Human beings don't merely survive, we search for meaning, we wrestle with morality, we create art, we pursue truth. And I think honestly, most of us, if we step back and we think about it, we've experienced this at some point in our lives. Maybe it's standing at a funeral and it hits you in that moment. Maybe it's being out in nature and you're looking out at a sunset or you're looking out at the scenery, you know, listening to music that that truly moves you, feeling outrage at injustice, thinking about someone that you you truly love. There's this deep sense that some things matter in a way that goes beyond just survival or a social preference. And Victor Frankel, who survived Auschwitz during the Holocaust, he captured this idea really well in his book Man's Search for Meaning. He said this: In the concentration camps, in this living laboratory on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself. Which one is actualized depends on decisions, but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is the being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz. However, he is also the being who entered those gas chambers upright with the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Israel on his lips. In other words, even in the most extreme conditions imaginable, human beings are still moral agents, and they're capable of choosing what kind of person they want to become, which is unique. And this means that being human isn't just about what happens to us, but it's about who we choose to become through what happens to us. We can either choose vice or virtue, good or evil, light or darkness. And this idea connects with one of the core aspects of what it actually means to be human. This is something that jumped out at me when I was, uh I was taking this online Hillsdale course from Hillsdale College. And it was a course, and in the middle of it, they were talking about C.S. Lewis's book, The Abolition of Man. And so they give this, he gives this definition of what it actually means to be human. And so part of what it means to be human is the ability to appropriately respond to what is eternal and unchanging. In other words, part of what it means to be human is this ability to rightly respond to objective realities like truth and beauty and goodness. It's the ability to choose things like sacrifice, the ability to choose love. But this raises another question because if things like truth and goodness and justice, if all of those things are real, we have to ask, where do they come from? In other words, what grounds them? You know, are they merely human inventions, these kind of social constructs, these evolutionary instincts, or are they reflections of something deeper and reflections of something that are more objective? Because if morality is ultimately subjective, good and evil are simply personal preferences or these social constructs, similar to choosing our favorite flavor of ice cream, or what kind of pizza is the best pizza, or what trends are best. If it's just subjective like that, then concepts like justice or human rights become incredibly difficult to ground objectively. At that point, morality becomes less about what is truly good and it becomes more about power or preferences or really just majority opinion. And this is why C.S. Lewis once said this when all that says it is good has been debunked, what says I want remains. So this is one of the reasons I find the Christian worldview so compelling. Because Christianity doesn't just merely say humans have value, it actually provides a reason why humans have value. Human beings, they're they're not accidents of nature. They are they are beings that are made in the image of God. And honestly, this is something I think about often as a dad. You know, one of the things my wife and I try to do with our girls is we want to try to help them understand these truths while they're still young. So one of the ways that one of the things we do in order to accomplish that is we go through these different memory verses together. And one that we often come back to is Genesis 127. And so Genesis 127 says, God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them. And there's so much truth that's packed into this small passage. One of the things that it expresses to us, or at least implies, is that we and we as humans are created on purpose and for a purpose. And we carry, we reflect the image of God Himself. And there's a there's a value, an inherent dignity and value in that reality. And part of that image is expressed in being male and female, or you know, it's expressed in being each of those. And so I want my girls to deeply understand all of this when they're wrestling with this question as far as what does it mean to be human? Because I think part of the confusion in our modern culture is that many people are searching for identity while at the same time being disconnected from any deeper understanding of what being human actually is. And so as we're uh as we're thinking about this, from a Christian perspective, human indignity isn't just something granted by governments or culture or uh intelligence or usefulness or whatever it may be, right? It's something that is intrinsic to us, something that we are born with because we are made in the image of God. And in the same way, morality is not merely a social construct or an invention. We would say that goodness is actually rooted in the character of God Himself, which means morality is not arbitrary. You can't reduce it to just personal preference. From a Christian perspective, morality is not invented by individuals. Again, it's not something that's made up by our culture. It's something that's grounded in the very nature and the character of God Himself. In other words, goodness is not merely whatever humans want it to be, but there is an objective standard beyond ourselves, which means that justice and human dignity, love, moral obligation, all of these things, they're not illusions, but they reflect something that's very real about the universe that we live in. Because at some point, every moral claim forces us to ask a deeper question. It forces us to ask, like, who says I have to do this, right? Who says human beings possess dignity and that I have to treat them a certain way? Who says justice actually matters? Who says cruelty is wrong? Who says we ought to love rather than exploit people? And if there's no answer beyond preference or biology or some sort of social consensus because we think that's best, then morality becomes increasingly difficult, again, to ground objectively. And maybe that's part of why modern culture feels so unstable at times. We still want the language of human dignity and justice, equality and rights, but we increasingly disconnect those ideas from any solid foundation underneath them. For example, truth itself is a prerequisite of justice. You can't have a solid idea of what justice is if you don't have a solid understanding of what is objectively true. Both have to work together. In order to have justice, you need, you need truth to undergird that. And maybe that's why these questions matter so much. Because the way we answer them doesn't just shape our philosophy. It shapes how we treat people, it shapes how we choose to love people, whether we see people as sacred or we see people as kind of disposable, whether justice is real and it actually matters, or it's just something that we made up. Whether love and sacrifice and truth and goodness, all of these things are ultimately meaningful, or are they just simply useful concepts for us? And maybe part of the reason our culture feels so fragmented right now, so broken and disconnected, is because we're trying to hold on to these ideas like dignity, justice, human rights, while at the same time letting go of the very foundation that once gave these ideas meaning or support. So as we're getting ready to wrap up today, this is kind of my proposal. Perhaps before we can rebuild our culture, you know, fix politics, heal the division, um, tackle all of these major problems, we first have to answer these two deeper questions. What does it mean to be human and where does morality come from? And once we've taken the time to really wrestle with and think through those two questions, then we can start tackling some of these great issues that we're facing in our nation and our world today. So, with that said, I want to say thanks for listening, thanks for subscribing, and I'll see you on the next episode.