Human Dignity and Bioethics

324 | Leon R. Kass
man is said to be god-like. Please note that the truth of the Bible’s
assertion does not rest on biblical authority: man’s more-than-animal
status is in fact performatively proved whenever human beings quit
the state of nature and set up life under such a law—as only the
god-like animal can do. The law that establishes that men are to be
law-abiding both insists on, and thereby demonstrates the truth of,
the superiority of man.
How is man god-like? Genesis 1—where it is first said that man
is created in God’s image—introduces us to the divine activities and
powers: (1) God speaks, commands, names, and blesses; (2) God
makes and makes freely; (3) God looks at and beholds the world; (4)
God is concerned with the goodness or perfection of things; (5) God
addresses solicitously other living creatures. In short: God exercises
speech and reason, freedom in doing and making, and the powers of
contemplation, judgment, and care.
Doubters may wonder whether this is truly the case about
God—after all, it is only on biblical authority that we regard God
as possessing these powers and activities. But even atheists recognize
that we human beings have them, and that they lift us above the
plane of a merely animal existence. Human beings, alone among the
earthly creatures, speak, plan, create, contemplate, and judge. Human
beings, alone among the creatures, can articulate a future goal
and bring it into being by their own purposive conduct. Human beings,
alone among the creatures, can think about the whole, marvel
at its many-splendored form and articulated order, wonder about its
beginning, and feel awe in beholding its grandeur and in pondering
the mystery of its source.
A complementary, preeminently moral, gloss on the “image of
God” is provided—quite explicitly—in Genesis 3, at the end of the
so-called second creation story. Commenting on the significance of
man’s (disobedient) eating from the tree of the knowledge of good
and bad, the Lord God comments:
Now the man is become like one of us knowing good and
bad….(3:22; emphasis added)*
* In the first creation-story, Genesis 1-2:3, man is created straightaway in God’s
likeness; in this second account, man is, to begin with, made of dust, and he acquires
god-like qualities only at the end, and then only in transgressing.