Isn’t it true that a thing is greater than the sum of it’s parts? Let me give you one of my favorite examples.
Chocolate chip cookies.
Chocolate chip cookies are comprised of multiple things, right? Some are good by themselves: eggs, chocolate chips, sugar, maybe even salt, if you’re into that kind of thing. Others are not so great by themselves: baking powder, vanilla extract, flour. But when they’re all together, a whole new reality is there. We don’t look at a chocolate chip cookie and think, “wow, look at that lump of eggs and flour and sugar and salt and all the rest.” The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
It’s funny to me that we take such things for granted with cookies, and a great many other things, but the buck stops when it comes to us. A story is more than words. It is the emotions and the adventure. It is the characters and their plight. The words are how the story is made, but they are not what the story really is. But you and I? We are just bags of protoplasm. We are just matter, atoms bouncing around and chemical reactions and electric synapses. Love and morality and religion and pain are just the chemical reactions occurring in some way that keeps our hearts beating just a little bit longer and fulfills some inherent drive to survive. The parts most definitely do not make something bigger.
I am not the most educated person. Perhaps if I were I could think of a better analogy than a cookie or a story. But it really is amazing to me that this is a pervasive worldview in our culture right now. Sure, we experience emotion, we experience romance, we experience what we perceive as right and wrong, but those experiences are meaningless. Emotion is the way our brain interprets the synapses going on inside itself. Romance is just the playing out of our desire to experience physical pleasure and pass on our genes. Right and wrong are just words we use to encourage or discourage certain behaviors that either promote our chance at survival or put that chance at risk, and they are most certainly relative and definitively mutable. To read anymore into it is to deny science its due and to engage in mystical delusion.
I disagree. I believe that just as a story is more than the words that make it up, and just as a cookie is more than the ingredients that we bake into it, we are more than our physical components. What a thing is made of is not what that thing is.
I think Genesis brilliantly puts it that men are made of dust. Whether you believe in Genesis as a literal story of the creation of humankind, or as a kind of allegory or parable or poem that symbolizes how creation happened, I hope you can appreciate just how divine the description of man as dust really is.
We are made of this natural stuff. We are made of matter. But matter is not what we are. We have animalistic impulses. But animals are not what we are. Even as important as emotions and ethics are to the human experience, emotion and ethics are not what we are. All these things compile on each other and become something greater. And just as I believe Genesis brilliantly states that we are made of dust, I think it brilliantly makes it plain that we were not what we are now until the breath of God came into us.
I think we sell ourselves short when we settle for thinking of ourselves as just matter and impulse. I think it’s a cop out. We would rather say it’s an acceptable part of our nature to engage in sexual pleasure often and with as many people as we want as opposed to admitting that this same philosophy on sexual pleasure is a huge part of the broken state of our families, which in turn is a part of the broken state of our children, which is why we have kids unable to cope with the world who end their own lives for lack of seeing a way out of the darkness they’re experiencing. We would rather give in to impulse than realize that we are more than the sum of our parts, and that to be human means not to be animal, and that when we choose to act more like animals, we lose a part of our humanity. Sexuality isn’t the only relevant point of discussion, but I believe it’s one of the most pervasive and perverted points.
Ultimately, I believe we have a responsibility to each other. We have a responsibility to bring out the best in each other. We have a responsibility to make the world a better place for the generations coming after us. This responsibility is unmet when we belittle what we really are. We can’t teach our children to be good without teaching our children that there is such a thing as Goodness. We can’t teach our children to love without teaching them that there is such a thing as Love. We can’t teach our children to take care of their neighbors and at the same time teach them that they only need to look out for themselves. And we can’t teach the reality of these things without the understanding that we are not just animals, we are not just the pieces and parts that make us up, and that there is God-breathed spirit inside of us, and that spirit was designed to live a certain way. God breathed life into us, and that is what made us human. And in that same intimate closeness with God we find the real fulfillment of who we are and how we are meant to live.
The Endeavor 