A Story That Delivers the Goods

What if we could have an intellectually sound explanation of why the human story has taken the course it has—one that also offers spiritually meaningful answers to the questions for which people have historically turned to religion? What if there were a picture of the human story that satisfied the standards of evidence and reason while also giving us a better understanding of what kind of creatures we are, of Good and Evil, and of what we are called upon to do if Life is not to be defeated by Death?

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For thousands of years, people have turned to religion not only for comfort, but for answers to the deepest questions of human existence: Who are we? Why is the world so full of suffering and evil? What is sacred? How should we live? I have come to believe that those same questions can be answered in a way that employs the standards of reason and evidence by which our civilization has learned to achieve reliable knowledge.

In the series of essays that follows, I will present a picture of the human story that satisfies our intellectual standards for truth while also showing how those truths provide profound spiritual meaning and direction.

Evidence from around the world suggests that human beings have a deep need to understand themselves in the context of a larger story. Even when they possess very little factual knowledge, people create stories to explain where they came from, why the world is as it is, and what place they occupy within it.

Religions have traditionally supplied answers to those questions, but they have generally not been answers arrived at through the disciplined weighing of evidence. (They have arisen instead from what might be called the “mythic imagination.”)

Modern secular culture, in turn, has largely concluded that, although human beings may need such a story, no account that satisfies our intellectual standards for truth can also provide the kind of spiritual meaning and moral orientation that religions have traditionally offered.

Over the years, I’ve discovered that this objectively quite plausible understanding of the human story leads naturally to answers to questions of profound spiritual significance—questions that the secular worldview has generally assumed could not be answered.

(And what this Better Human Story has made possible for me, I believe it can also make possible for others.)

One example may suggest the kind of transformation in understanding that this story makes possible.

The Better Human Story offers a fundamentally different answer to one of humanity’s oldest questions: Why is there so much evil and destructiveness in the world? [BOLDED QUESTION?]

It identifies forces [BOLDED?] that arise, not from human nature, but from the unprecedented kind of system that inevitably [BOLDED?] emerges once an intelligent species extricates itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life. From that moment on, it is INEVITABLY compelled to enact an unchosen social evolutionary process that powerfully – and destructively – shapes its history.

The objectively quite plausible conclusion that any civilization-creating species will inadvertently plunge into an ugly history—regardless of its own inborn nature—tells us something important about our “spiritual” understanding of ourselves:

We are better creatures than we have thought ourselves to be.

The Bible – crafted by people who were quite aware of the ugliness, but lacked the evolutionary perspective and historical knowledge that reveal the inevitable systemic forces – arrived at a very different answer.

It portrays human beings as morally corrupted from the beginning. Human wickedness grows so great that God repents having created us and destroys almost the entire species in the Flood. Christianity continues that understanding by placing humanity’s sinfulness at the center of the human predicament. It assumed that the ugliness that was visible was a clear mirror of the kind of creatures we are.

Without the evolutionary perspective that modern science has provided, such dark conclusions seem inevitable.

The question of human nature is but one of the dimensions illuminated by this Better Human Story. It changes how we understand ourselves and the process we’re swept up in.

If there were a way of understanding the human story that satisfies both our standards of truth and our desire for spiritually meaningful answers, would you want to see it? If so, I invite you to follow this series and judge for yourself whether it delivers on that promise.