A few weeks ago my wife and I made our first trip to Toys R Us in probably 15 years. With our 11-month old grandson in my arms, we strolled the aisles until we found the object of our quest—a bright red riding toy.
It’s a cool toy, shaped like a car with steering wheel, dashboard and seatbelt. But the real safety feature is a sturdy three-foot handle on the back that an adult uses to push, steer and stop. Sam loved it immediately. He held the steering wheel while I pushed him through the store making motor noises.
We had only had the toy car a few days when something interesting happened. Sam rode the “car” to the pool, and while he was playing in the water he noticed another little boy sitting on his toy. He started fussing and grunting. He can’t talk yet, but if he could he would certainly have cried out, “MINE!”
Where does that come from? What is it about our human nature that, before we even know how to walk and talk, we know selfishness? Evolutionists would call it a survival instinct, but that seems superficial. There is no fear or flight at work here, no feast or famine. It’s just a plastic car, one Sam experienced having in his life for a cumulative period of maybe 45 minutes.
Theologians call it original sin—the idea that the seeds of our destruction are planted in us all, even before we are born. Like brown eyes, frizzy hair and the ability to curl our tongues, we are programmed for pride, greed and anger.
We are also programmed to do good. Sam is a chronically happy child, but in the nursery when he sees a child crying, he cries too. It’s called empathy, and we all have it to varying degrees. We feel better when those around us are doing well. When we see someone struggling, we feel an innate desire to take some helpful action.
It is like we are designed with this bent to do bad and desire to do good. We go through life day by day juggling the two and hoping for the best.
A few days after buying the toy I was listening to an NPR interview of Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist at the University of California-Santa Barbara and a pioneer in split-brain research. He wrote a book called The Ethical Brain, and has just published a new one called Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.
Dr. Gazzaniga is no theologian. In fact, after listening to him for close to an hour (he is brilliant and engaging man), I would conclude that he does not have a religious synapse at work in either the left or right side of his brain. But he does have some interesting ideas about goodness. He says our innate desire to wish someone a good day, to help someone out, or be kind to a stranger is uniquely human--something that does not exist in the larger animal kingdom.
Dr. Gazzaniga said in the interview that if the human race suddenly started from scratch, just suddenly came into existence with no past history or memories of traditions, religious practices or deities, that we would invent God in less than a month. In other words, our brains are wired to look for God.
For the scientist who rejects the idea of God, there must be an animalistic, natural or scientific explanation for this. Gazzaniga puts his faith in science. I put my faith elsewhere.
Let’s review--we have in us an innate selfishness, and also an innate desire to do good. And we also have an innate desire to find and know God. To me, this is powerful evidence of a grand, purposeful design.
Scripture tells us we are created in the image of God—God the omnipotent, God who can do anything he wants. As chips off that block, we have in us the same desire—to do anything we want—but limited human ability to pull it off.
I’m no theologian either, but I think it works like this: God is the creator, so all of us--made after his image--have in us the desire to create as well. But we have limitations. We can’t create everything. God is the healer, so in us there is the capacity to heal also, but we can’t cure everything. God is all knowing, and so we are capable of great knowledge, but we can’t know it all. God is love, so we love too, but imperfectly.
God created us to know him, and in a sense we all do—even the atheist and evolutionary biologist. He created us with the capacity to know him and love him, reject him, or simply substitute something in his place.
While writing this I am listening to Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy!, some of which deserves a place in our worship hymnals. As I write this paragraph, I’m listening to You Gotta Serve Somebody. It’s so true. It may the devil, or it may be the Lord. It may be self or science, treasure or pleasure, but you gotta serve somebody. We’re wired to do it.
You might say my grandson Sam is programmed with the Jesus gene. We all are. We are fully human, with all the limitations and self-preserving instincts that go with being the one animal that God chose to make in his image, but an animal nonetheless. But what sets us above all other animals is that we also have in us the divine nature to pursue God, and to do good along the way.
Jesus did it perfectly. We do it in fits and starts, sometimes distracted by little red cars.
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