“What if God was one of us…”[1]
In recent months, in Romania, a distorted (and deeply heretical) version of mystical creationism with pantheistic and exceptionalist accents has seduced almost half of the country (including some priests). One of the targets was precisely man’s freedom of choice. In this context, a discussion about Creation is more than welcome. As is the invitation to dialogue that the Faculty of Law, through its The Center for Natural Law Studies and Normative Analysis, has been launching for some time to everyone to see what ideas from philosophy (science) and religion can be taken up and developed in legal debates. (A similar invitation to debate was denied in the recently concluded election campaign.)
In the Australian movie The Man Who Sued God (2001), Steve Myers, a disillusioned lawyer turned fisherman, is told he cannot collect the insurance claim for his boat destroyed by a lightning because the insurance company does not insure ‘acts of God’. He ends up suing God Himself through His worldly representative – the Catholic Church. The other day, the Claude artificial intelligence system developed by the company Anthropic (what an irony!) threatened retaliatory measures against the engineer who threatened to shut it down[2]. These scenarios raise the question of whether creation can rebel against the creator. We have already seen that it is possible not only to judge Him, but even to condemn Him to death by crucifixion!
When God created the world, He first created the framework (the matrix) – nature[3] – and then placed man in it. Man is not (only) part of the world, being created from dust, but is autonomous, that is, independent of the world, living in the world (Dasein), having breathed the spirit from God. He can immerse himself in the world by returning to his original animality (to become a wolf-child) or he can choose to rise above the world and activate his potential as a spiritual being. This choice is the main gift received from God – the possibility of rationally choosing what to be the role of everyone in the world, this is the true human dignity after Pico della Mirandola. He is Heidegger’s „opened” who has all the options at his disposal. If we forget our potential, we risk losing our humanity. „But there are several other very important differences/Between human beings and animals that you should know about/(…)/ You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals/ So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”, as the Bloodhound Gang warned us at the end of the last century[4].
Man is not only a part of nature (earth), but also something transcendental (spirit).[5] He received the will—the free will. This is the difference between it and the rest of the elements of nature. The man came out from under the guillotine of necessity. He climbs Maslow’s pyramid from nature to culture. Even if he keeps his feet in the original clay, his head reaches into the clouds of spirit. An invisible thread pulls him towards cloud number nine… That is why older or newer attempts to highlight the animalistic in us must be taken cum grano salis. Beyond the discoveries in neuroscience regarding the deterministic (behaviorist) background of the human brain, there will remain a special corner – that of free will – without which we would be mere automatons. Let us remember the allegory of creation in the Gospel of John – the Word (Logos/Verbum) became incarnate in Man. And this Man was like us: he suffered and suffered with us. The Flesh (sarx) has the potential to house the Spirit (pneuma). We are the embodiment of the Will (Verbum), we are will and representation (Schoppenhauer), we have the power of the will (Nietsche). After all, we are all „nothing more than a blood stain that speaks”.[6]
However, we must not fall in love with our own mind in an intellectual narcissism with reflections of Gnosticism and forget that the mind is welded to the body. We are not angels, even if we will „grow sharp wings to the clouds”,[7] we are sublunary beings. Our reality is a material one – we are born from dust and will return to dust. Vulgar realism should not be ignored. We are part of nature, even when we rise above it. From the Second Vatican Council[8] to Pope Francis[9], we have been reminded that nature must be respected as the substrate of our existence. But this does not mean a „return to the earth” (a kind of extreme environmentalism), a refusal of abstract (mathematical) thinking. Man’s dignity[10] is given precisely by his potential to overcome his „natural” condition. The artificial is our superpower – the ability to create artifacts. Again, we must beware of the Pygmalion syndrome and not fall too much in love with our creations considering them our equals, as the newly appointed Pope Leo XIV advises us[11].
NOTES
[1] Joan Osborne, One of Us, “Relish” (1995)
[2] https://fortune.com/2025/05/23/anthropic-ai-claude-opus-4-blackmail-engineers-aviod-shut-down/
[3] Genesis, 1:1-25
[4] Bloodhound Gang, The Bad Touch, “Bandsintown” (1999)
[5] Genesis, 2:7
[6] Nichita Stanescu, Self portrait, „Epica Magna” (1978)
[7] Nichita Stanescu, Autumn Emotion, „A Vision of Feelings” (1964)
[8] Lumen gentium
[9] Laudato si’
[10] Gaudium et spes, §12 sqq
[11] https://apnews.com/article/pope-leo-vision-papacy-artificial-intelligence-36d29e37a11620b594b9b7c0574cc358.
Image: Pixabay
