Are Human Beings 'Spiritual' Creatures?

What Does it Mean to Say that Human Beings are ‘Spiritual’ Animals?

Lon Clay Hill, Jr.
Miramar, FL, USA

Preliminaries for a discussion on words, canons, belief, faith, and hypocrisy in both politics and religion. In coming months the author hopes to develop a number of thoughts in postings on this blog. This particular post is more of an attempt to describe his own assumptions than an argument with those who do not share those assumptions.


Are Human Beings ‘Spiritual’ Animals?

The question above is, for many people, a matter for serious debate. I have participated and, occasionally, still do participate in such discussions and or debates about this issue. However, I usually prefer to discuss another issue and I do so here, namely:

What is it about Human Beings that, for me, — inescapably — requires that I employ the term ‘Spiritual’ Animal?


Homo sapiens, a talking and spiritual animal or creature!

Human beings have several important characteristics which differentiate then from most living animals on the earth. To my way of thinking, the following list of chacterisitics seem particularly salient, to wit:

(1) Human beings cover their nakedness
(2) Human beings have opposable thumbs that have apparently made it easier for them to use tools than all or almost all known animals
(3) Human beings have special larynx muscles that have apparently made it easier for them to speak than all or almost all known animals
(4) Human beings have brains that enable them to make creative use of both tools and speech
(5) Human beings bury their dead
(6) Human beings have thoughts, opinions, and beliefs that transcend both their immediate and experienced physical, temporal, cultural, and intellectual environments.

The author makes no claim that these characteristics are the most important characteristics which define our species. Nor does the author claim that any of these characteristics are unique to humans — our knowledge of the internal mental characteristics of other terrestrial creatures is quite limited. We do know that chimpanzees make a few tools, that birds create songs beautiful to our ears, that dolphins and whales use complex audio signals that are analogous to both speech and song, and that elephants often guard their dead for several days. Beyond the earth, of course, we do not know whether intelligent extra-terrestrial life is either frequent or non-existent.

What I do assert is that the above list suggests that members of the species homo sapiens can be usefully described as talking, spiritual animals. In this context the word “spiritual” does not imply any particular religion. What I mean here is that the facts suggest that humans are - at least sometimes - seriously concerned with mental and emotional concerns and commitments that transcend our every day existence. Indeed, my use of the word spiritual here can be better understood by the German word “geistlich”. Spiritual - as I define it here - has to do with human beings’ abilities to construct elaborate artistic, societal, literary, mathematical, political, and other intellectual or mental structures. While it is true that I believe that religious impulses and thoughts can also be usefully described as “spiritual” activities, the word as I use it here can also be used without compromise by pantheists, deists, and some atheists. The principal intellectual opponents of humans as spiritual creatures as defined here would be (1) logical positivists who believe that all thoughts are epiphenomena of material processes, (2) some Darwinian evolutionists who believe that all biological phenomena are products of blind and random events, and -of course - (3) any cynics who would assert that all phenomena and thoughts are void of genuine meaning.

For now, at least, I do not wish to argue these issues in depth. Rather, I wish simply to emphasize that we humans possess some rather complex interior mental and emotional states and commitments and that I shall refer to this deep interior complex as our spiritual life. [Some readers might be more comfortable with terms such as “psychological states”. However, such terminology is too restricted in its implications for me just. Of course, some religious uses of the term spirit are too narrow in their implications for some readers.] With all of these caveats, I may have gotten away from my central corollary — speech is central to much of our spiritual and mental life and words are the most prominent and indispensable constituents of our intellectual traditions which reach back into history. (The interplay between word and images is, of course, undergoing a radical transformation today, but - for now - we can contemplate an indefinite future in which words as words are still absolutely essential for communication.)

With these considerations and stipulations in the background, I hope to address some more contentious political and religious issues in future blogs.

LCHj - 14 October 2010