A couple of years ago, some good friends of ours suffered a devastating house fire. They woke at 3am to the smell of smoke, discovered a kitchen blaze that had already spread to the lounge and the hall, and so they grabbed their kids, the cat, two guinea pigs, and (at the insistence of their six-year-old) a glass tank containing three stick insects, and fled to the safety of a neighbour’s house, from where they called the fire brigade. By the time two fire tenders had arrived, sirens screaming and lights flashing, it was too late—the fire had taken hold and although the hoses dosed the flames, almost everything was destroyed. “We lost virtually every possession,” our friends said afterwards, “but at least nobody was hurt. Not even a stick insect was left behind.”
Our friends’ experience got me thinking, not least about the virtue of pets who can find their own way to safety in an emergency. It especially got me thinking about the question: if my own house were to catch fire, what would I save? If, after rescuing my wife and kids, I had the time to pull one thing from the flames, what would it be? Would I liberate the TV, our family photo albums, or our collection of novelty teapots? No, I think my first instinct as a bibliophile would be to try to save my library. The only problem there is that I have an eclectic collection of over 3,000 books crammed onto my shelves (my wife thinks that a small, self-contained, one-room fire could save us a fortune next time we move house). So I guess I would have to pick one book to rescue before the flames took hold.
And my choice would be easy: I would retrieve the most expensive book I own. A book that I paid almost £300 for some ten years ago. A book that most readers have probably never heard of: The Assault on Mount Everest 1922. It’s an exciting report of the second British expedition to Mount Everest, full of thrills, tension, and drama—and as an avid student of mountaineering history, I bought this first edition copy and it has pride of place on my shelves.[1] The book is especially valuable because stuck inside it is a postcard that I paid £50 for around the same time—a postcard that was actually sent from the advanced base camp on the 1924 Everest expedition.
Now I know what you’re thinking: wasn’t that a lot of money to pay for a dusty second-hand book and a faded old postcard? And one level you’d be right: the postcard is merely a piece of cardboard and the book, just a collection of pages, yellowed with age. But I was willing to pay that price because the book and the postcard were valuable to me.
Interestingly, this is actually a basic principle of economics: namely that value is not intrinsic, but is determined by what somebody is prepared to pay. Consider a more modern example—a digital tablet. Perhaps some of you are reading this essay on an iPad, for instance, safe in the knowledge that if I start boring you, you can play Angry Politicians or Candy Crush Kardashians or something. You probably paid a lot of money for your iPad and why? Because it’s useful to you: perhaps for email, web browsing, work, or—if you’re like me—playing the occasional game while sitting on the toilet. But think about this for a moment: your iPad isn’t intrinsically worth hundreds of pounds. That was simply what Apple believed people were prepared to pay. Take your iPad to a desert island, with no power, no WiFi, no phone reception and what would somebody pay? Probably very little, for aside from making a fancy glass chopping board for seafood, your iPad be useless.
Value is not intrinsic or inherent to something—whether it’s a book or a gadget or anything—rather value is purely determined by what somebody is prepared to pay.
Which raises a fascinating question: what then of human value? Deeply ingrained in our culture is the belief that human beings have fundamental value, intrinsic worth, that humans are priceless and precious. The whole edifice of human rights, for example, is built upon this idea. But where is human value located?
Once you ask “Why do humans have value?” you quickly run into difficulties. After all, if you consider the stuff of which we’re made, the chemical parts—so much iron, so much carbon, so much fat (too much, in my case)—it’s been calculated that the typical human being is worth about £37.50. Nowhere near enough to purchase an iPad or a first edition book, not even enough for a historic postcard.
Thankfully nobody actually thinks the worth of a human being can be discerned by considering the stuff we’re made from. Or do they? Actually, many famous atheist thinkers throughout history have made precisely this claim. For example, Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA in 1953, wrote:
Your joy and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons’.”[2]
Whilst theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss, put it even more bluntly:
We are a 1 percent bit of pollution within the universe. We are completely insignificant.[3]
If I had the time and was feeling of a nihilistic frame of mind, there are plenty more similar statements by other atheist intellectuals I could cite, but that would be a bit depressing. Rather let’s at least commend the attempt of Crick and Krauss to be honest about the implications of their atheism for human value whilst pointing out that it would be be a very brave person who tried this idea out in the real world. Whether it’s the killing of George Floyd, or the genocide of the Uighurs, or sexual trafficking, or poverty, simply shrugging and saying “What does it matter if a bit of pollution or collection of neurons suffers in some way?” is going to get you about as far as trying to scale Mount Everest whilst wearing nothing but swimming trunks and using a toothpick as an ice-axe.
By contrast, the Bible has something very different to say about human value. Remember what we discovered about value not being intrinsic, but instead being conferred by what somebody is prepared to pay? So what was somebody prepared to pay for you and I, for each and every one of us, no matter our background, status, race, or sex? The Bible answers that very question directly:
God demonstrates his own love for us in this—while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
In other words, the Bible says, God was prepared to pay the life of his son, Jesus Christ, for us—an incredibly costly, infinitely high price—for each one of us, even while we were God’s enemies, in outright rebellion against the one who created us and loves us. That price that God was prepared to pay gives a tremendous basis for human value—and therefore a foundation for human rights, justice, and dignity.
Reflecting on the challenge for atheists in trying to come up with a basis for human value that does not depend upon God, the Australian atheist Raimond Gaita made this powerful observation:
We may say that all human beings are inestimably precious … that they are owed unconditional respect, that they possess inalienable rights, and, of course, that they possess inalienable dignity. In my judgment these are ways of trying to say what we feel a need to say when we are estranged from the conceptual resources we need to say it. Be that as it may: each is problematic and contentious. Not one of them has the simple power of the religious ways of speaking.[4]
More recently, in his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, secular historian Tom Holland sets out in considerable detail just how much of what we take for granted about human value has thoroughly Christian roots. For all of its attempts to be secular and post-Christian, the West is deeply Christian in its convictions about human personhood. Tom writes:
Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world.[5]
Next time you see a story in the news about justice, or your friend or colleague speaks positively about human rights, or you see somebody suffering and you instinctively think “That’s not right!” pause for a moment and ask yourself where human value is located. Then reflect on the starkness of the choices of answer on offer: if atheism is true, then human value is a fiction; perhaps a beautiful fiction, but illusory none the less. Whereas if Christianity is true, then human beings are not merely the stuff of which we are made, but are people infinitely precious, bearing value and worth because of what God was willing to pay for each one of us.
As an atheist friend once remarked to me in an unguarded moment: “I can’t escape the conclusion that even though I don’t believe in Christianity, I increasingly want it to be true, because if it isn’t, the consequences are utterly depressing and horrific.” To which I replied: maybe it’s therefore time to give the evidence for Christianity a deeper look.
[1] In between Las Mytting’s Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way and Terry Pratchett’s The Unadulterated Cat. See, I told you I had eclectic tastes.
[2] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Touchstone, 1994) p. 1.
[3] Cited in Amanda Lohrey, ‘The Big Nothing: Lawrence Krauss and Arse-Kicking Physics’, The Monthly, October 2012 (http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/october/1354074365/amanda-lohrey/big-nothing). As a piece of fun, geeky mathematics, it is generally accepted that the known universe contains 1×1080 atoms. Meanwhile, an average human being contains 7×1027 atoms and there are approximately 7 billion humans alive today (7 x 109). Multiply those two together and we get the total number of atoms in all humans: roughly 4.9 x 1037. That means that the percentage of all atoms that are currently busying themselves forming part of a human being is 4.9×10-43%. Krauss however claims we are a ‘1 percent bit of pollution’—making him off by a factor of 2 x 1040. For non-mathematicians, that’s a 2 with 40 zeroes after it. Let’s be grateful Krauss is a cosmologist, not an economist.
[4] Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge, 2002 [1998]) 23; see the essay of the same title by Raimond Gaita in The Guardian, 22 May 2001 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/may/22/socialsciences.highereducation).
[5] Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little, Brown, 2019) p.523.
