What is a Human Being?

What is a human being? This question has occupied philosophers, scientists, and religious seekers for millennia. It is the core essence of our seeking as people. Every single student I’ve worked with has wanted me to tell them what I see in them. It’s fascinating. Underneath every human desire is the wish to know, “What am I?”

How we answer this question matters because it impacts how we raise our children, do business, make art and music, what medical treatments we take, and how we treat people, among others. It also matters when we consider our intersection with AI, something I alluded to in last week’s post. How we answer this question guides all human culture and striving.

Let us therefore begin by asking what makes us live. Like stones, we have physical bodies. Our bones are perhaps the clearest example of our own mineral nature. However, like plants, we also breathe and grow. Something brings the inanimate matter of our bodies to life and sustains us from conception until death. This life body, or at least its signature, can be most clearly observed when people sleep. There they lay on the bed with their personality completely withdrawn. “They” go away, yet, their body continues to breathe and metabolize.

Desire

If we share physical bodies with stones and life bodies with plants, we share our capacity for desire, repulsion, attraction, and aversion with the animals. We want something like a piece of pizza, and we move towards it. We may not want the broccoli served on the side, and we push that away. (Five-year-olds are very good at that one especially.) Humans have desires and the ability to pursue them. Some desires, like food, shelter, and reproduction we share with animals. Other, perhaps “higher,” desires like religious or spiritual aspirations are uniquely human. We make meaning where animals do not.

So, What is a Human Being?

Humans are self-aware. Some higher animals also show some semblance of self-awareness, like recognizing a mark on their own body when viewing themselves in a mirror. However, even the most linguistically gifted primates have only concrete language, not symbolic language. In other words, everything they know is sense-based. They can gesture that they want the banana, but that doesn’t mean they know who they are, so to speak. The human “I,” is a supersensory reality which requires symbolic language for “I” is not a sensory object. It requires the capacity for abstraction.

“I” is furthermore a name I can only call myself. I cannot say “I” to you nor you to me. At best, I can point to my body and yours, but the body is not the “I” since the “I” is a pure thought. Animals do not say “I” to themselves, even if they know where their own bodies are in space. In this capacity, therefore, humans are unique.

What is the Nature of “I?”

If we want to know, “What is a human being?” we have to ask, what is the nature of this “I?” and “Where does it come from?” Is it but an illusion of thought, a happy accident of consciousness? Materialists argue we and our thoughts are nothing but matter. They point to EEG readings that register the imprint of consciousness on matter as evidence that thought is nothing but chemicals and electricity firing. Materialists furthermore cite experiments where they poke the brain and cause memory recall, among other phenomena, as further proof of this. For people like Francis Crick, who helped discover DNA, consciousness is nothing but an emergent property of matter¹.

Ok, but then, why does matter awaken at all? Why would a stone come to know itself and not be content just to remain a stone? Furthermore, how and why would matter become self-aware unless self-awareness lived already within it as latent potential? Put another way, how could matter awaken to consciousness if it were not somehow already made of consciousness? The materialist counters by saying that two elements, like hydrogen and oxygen, combine to form a substance qualitatively different from both, in water. They use this example to show how material elements like neurons and chemicals combine to produce consciousness. This analogy, however, is a categorical error. Water, hydrogen, and oxygen, are all physical. Consciousness, however, is not, so they have to show how something non-physical emerges from something physical.

The Evolutionary Argument for Desire

Evolutionists like Darwin, Dawkins, and others argue that desire serves the perpetuation of genes. Even the altruism of parents, for them, serves this function when they sacrifice their own well-being for the perpetuation of the species. So, then why would somebody like Jesus of Nazareth self-sacrifice for the good of all? He had no children as far as we know. Jesus also didn’t die saving anyone’s life. Here, the evolutionary argument encounters a hole it cannot fill.

How Did Matter Come to Life to Begin With?

The Miller-Urey experiment in 1952 is often used to show how seemingly inanimate processes can bring matter to life. In this demonstration, scientists brought together the building blocks of life – methane, hydrogen, ammonia and water vapor – in a chamber. They then shot electricity through the mixture and found that amino acids began to form². How interesting! Materialists interpret these results to say that creation could arise without a creator nor creative intelligence at work. The problem with this conclusion is it leaves out a vital element from the experiment: the intelligent humans who set the whole thing up to begin with! The Miller-Urey experiment cannot, therefore, substantiate the hypothesis of a creation without a creator, for their experiment included one. Even if, in fact, amino acids did form long ago from the interaction of electricity and pre-existing elements, who set these cosmic conditions up in such a perfect way so that life would eventually emerge? Who set the process in motion? Materialism unfortunately leaves us in the dark, here.

So, what is a human being? Are we just lumps of matter that accidentally became self-conscious? Did this self-consciousness play a clever trick on itself to fool itself into thinking it’s something real? Or, is there more to the story than even the cleverest materialists know? What do you think, and how will it influence how you raise and educate your children? How will it impact the capacities you cultivate in them vs. what you encourage them to outsource out to AI?

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References:

1. Youvan, D. C. (2025, February 6). Francis Crick and the materialist view of consciousness: The scientific basis of his atheism [Preprint]. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.30998.25929
2. Miller-Urey Experiment. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 30, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment