The exclusive humanist’s exceptionalist dogma of humanity’s peculiar importance, our central place in the universe, is defeated by realisations grasped in our posthumanist age concerning the contingency of the species’ essential or conceptual boundaries, the functional similarity between us and actual or possible non-human life forms, and the ultimate indifference of physical and chemical laws underwriting and confronting the biology of any particular life-form type, in particular, and molecular conglomerates associated with life, in general. The dogma is grounded in a residual appropriation of the Christian doctrine of the Imago Dei, i.e. that each human being bears the divine image – an appropriation that took humanity’s reflected glory of transcendent divinity and attempted to ground it in a divine fire within – as well as the staggering success enjoyed in the last 400 years, or so, by humanity in coming to understand and master those very physical and chemical laws. Of course, one might think that the latter consideration remains a reason to return to the former doctrine from which we departed, in our hubris, now that humanism is dead.
The dogma of human exceptionalism is a key presupposition of a more central humanistic belief in the harmony latent between our human nature and the wider universe, such that humanity is guaranteed its inheritance of knowledge, prosperity and glorious dominion if only we remain true to our essential humanity, whatever that turns out to entail. Exceptionalism is a presupposition, here, because there could only be such a latent harmonisation and destiny if what it means to be human exhibits some structural resonance with the wider universe, as a matter of physical necessity. If who and what we are, personally and biologically, has emerged from the dark abyss of the cosmic past as a matter of pure contingency, and there has been no physical necessity determining its course to that point, then there is no basis to project our development forward on the understanding that the physical forces that got us this far will continue in any particular direction with regard to personally and biologically salient trajectories, as distinct from merely chemical and physical ones.
Having said that, though, were we to contemplate a return to a theocentric conception of human exclusivism premised on reflecting divine glory, we do not immediately escape this problem for humanists who seek to ground our cosmic destiny in an intrinsic human nature with principled boundaries that somehow carve nature at the joints, drawing a bright line to demarcate the human from the non-human, and other such metaphors. Firstly, note that a return to theocentrism would provide the lost basis for the needed harmony between human nature and the nature of the wider physical universe. That harmony would cease to hold as an internal relation between humanity and the universe, i.e. cease to hold in virtue of their intrinsic natures alone, and it would become an external relation, instead, holding in virtue of something beyond those two relata. That third consideration would be God. However, it can still hold as a necessary relation – the harmonisation between humanity and the universe – in virtue of the necessary relation between God’s will and its objects. That is, God’s will that humanity exists and that the wider universe exists necessitates them and all of the external relations holding between them, including the possibility of their harmonisation, in the sense of a guaranteed ascendency, therefore.
Such a divinely decreed harmony, which does not depend on any internal relation holding between humanity in the universe, does not depend, therefore, on there being any principled way to define the human nature, drawing a bright line and carving nature at the joints. However, escaping this metaphysical problem has created a related epistemological problem. How do we know that such a divinely determined harmony does exist between humanity and the wider universe? The answer can only lie with a specific, divine revelation, such as that motivating Christian theology concerning humanity bearing the divine image, which guarantees the centrality of humanity in God’s Creation. And there, we land back in the metaphysical problem, as we ask what it means to bear the divine image when it has already been established that human nature is not distinguished, in a principled way, from other actual and possible forms of life. Prominent essentialist attempts to provide an analysis of the divine mark include appeals to reason, as prioritised from the Enlightenment, compassion and creativity, as prioritised by Romanticists, and other relational qualities of humanity, according with the triune nature of the God of orthodox Christianity. Yet, none of these qualities could not conceivably be exemplified by other biological species or artificially originating functional analogues.
One possible answer as to what bearing the divine image entails would be to conflate it with the relational quality of harmonisation with the wider universe, which the divine image is needed to explain. This would have the neat effect of strengthening the conceptual connection between the two ideas of the divine image and universal harmonisation, so that no extra argument is needed as to why the former entails the latter. It would work like this. Whatever it means for humanity to bear the image of God, it will suggest some quality that is similar to, but derivative from and dependent upon, a quality possessed by God. The harmonisation relation between God and the universe of Creation holds as a matter of necessity due to his nature including the quality of omnipotence. The harmonisation relation between humanity and the wider universe holds contingently, according to the physical laws of the universe, but as a matter of necessity due to the necessity entailed by God’s will and omnipotence. Thus, humanity can be said to bear the image of God in the sense of being similarly harmonised with the universe, in terms of the universe being beneficially responsive to our human nature, in a way that is derivative from and dependent upon the originating harmonisation between God and Creation.
If this is right, then the epistemological basis for regarding the human species as being the bearer of the divine, contingent and vague though our essence may be, is a combination of the divine revelation that humanity is privileged as the divine image bearer, together with any evidence we already have that humanity is more successful in understanding and harnessing the forces of the universe than is to be expected given that very understanding of the universe. And this is, arguably, the state of things, because the universal grasp of our existing scientific knowledge, and the technological power to manipulate the physical world that it gives us, already seems to go beyond the epistemic power that we can explain having recourse only to the localised sociological and environmental factors that do account for the production of our scientific knowledge.
Theocentric Posthumanism 