The Weight of Being Someone

We keep finding fingerprints. A universe that need not exist, yet does; balanced and legible as though arranged; a moral law pressing from within. Now consider the strangest object in the known cosmos, the one doing all this considering: you. A human being is a knot of contradictions for any purely material account, and the places where that account frays are worth examining, because they all seem to point the same way.

The lights are on

Start with the plainest fact of your existence, the one so close you look straight past it: there is something it is like to be you. You are not merely processing information the way a thermostat or a laptop does. You are aware. There is redness in your seeing of red, an ache in your grief, a taste to the coffee. Philosophers call this consciousness, and after centuries of effort, no one has the faintest idea how to get it out of matter.

This is not a gap that more brain scans will close. We can map every neuron and trace every electrical pulse, and we will have described the machinery — but the machinery is not the experience. Why should three pounds of electrified tissue have an inner life at all? Why is anyone home? The honest materialists admit this freely; they call it "the hard problem" and confess they cannot even imagine what a solution would look like. That the basic building blocks of reality, rearranged, should suddenly light up from the inside and say I is not something physics predicts or explains. But it is exactly what you would expect if mind, not matter, lies at the root of things — if consciousness runs deep because the ground of everything is Someone conscious, and we are, however faintly, in that likeness.

The trap under the skeptic's chair

Here is a difficulty that cuts deeper still, and it lands hardest precisely on the person who wants to explain everything by blind natural processes. If your mind is nothing but the accidental by-product of chemistry — neurons firing as physics dictates, shaped by evolution only to keep your ancestors alive — then why trust a single thing it concludes?

Evolution selects for survival, not for truth. A belief that helps you breed will be favoured whether it is accurate or not. So if all your thoughts are merely the rustling of survival-shaped chemistry, you have no reason to trust that thought either — including the thought that there is no God. The strict materialist quietly saws off the branch he is sitting on: he uses reason to argue that reason is only chemistry, forgetting that if reason is only chemistry, his own argument is only chemistry too, and settles nothing. To trust our minds to reach truth — as every scientist and every skeptic must — is already to assume that our reason is more than a survival trick, that it answers to a real order of truth. That assumption is at home in a universe grounded in Reason. It is a stowaway in a universe grounded in mud.

The ache that has no earthly object

Now the quietest clue, and to many the most personal. There is a particular kind of longing that visits almost everyone — a sudden ache stirred by a bar of music, a landscape at dusk, the last pages of a book, the face of someone loved. For a moment we want something with our whole selves; then it slips away, and we find that no thing we can name was ever quite the thing we wanted. We chase it into achievements, relationships, experiences, and each one, once grasped, turns out not to have been it. The wanting outlives every object offered to it.

We are usually told this is immaturity, or advertising, or a chemical itch — that we should lower our expectations and make peace with the fact that nothing satisfies. But there is another reading, at least as reasonable. A newborn's hunger implies that food exists. Curiosity implies there are things to be known. Desire, as a rule, corresponds to something real that answers it. What, then, of a desire that no created thing can fill? Perhaps the reason nothing in the world finally satisfies it is that we were not made, in the end, for the world. As one writer put it: if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Too heavy for the box

Consciousness, reason, and this restless longing are joined by a fourth thing that will not sit still in a material box: our helpless response to beauty, and our unshakeable sense that persons matter. We treat a human being as possessing a dignity beyond price, as owed justice and love — and we are right to. But if a person is only a temporary arrangement of atoms, there is nothing there to command such reverence; you might as well revere a sandcastle. Every time we insist that a human life is sacred, we speak a language that materialism cannot pay for and that Christianity can — the language of creatures made in the image of God.

None of these is a knockdown proof, and I keep saying so on purpose. But step back and see the pattern. The universe points to a Mind. The moral law points to a Goodness. And the human person — awake, reasoning, aching for what the world cannot give, bowing before beauty and before the worth of others — points the same way, from the inside. We are exactly the sort of beings you would expect to find in a world made by God and made for him, and exactly the sort of beings who make no sense at all as cosmic accidents soon to be undone. The weight you feel in simply being someone is not a malfunction. It is a clue about where you came from — and a hint about where the ache is finally meant to lead.