Scott R. Sehon

According to a certain religious tradition, Adam and Eve violated God’s command by eating of the tree of knowledge. God rebukes the couple, saying, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” But a mere three verses later, God says that the pair has now become godlike: “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.”

The religious myth is emblematic of a deep philosophical puzzle. Human beings are material, composed of dust; yet we are also able to understand that there is good and there is evil, and we are able to choose between them. In more philosophical terminology, the godlike characteristics referred to in the Genesis creation myth were these: meaning, agency, and normativity.

Many philosophers have wrestled with facets of this puzzle: they have tried to make sense of these mysterious phenomena, while still regarding human beings as just another part of the natural world. Philosophers have tried to avoid the nihilism that seems to result from seeing humanity as mere dust, while also trying to avoid seeing us as godlike, as magical. Philosophers have tried to find a middle ground between dust and divinity, between nihilism and magic.

I will argue, first, that the middle ground is unstable: attempts to give an account of normativity and agency within the confines of natural science fail. But faced with a choice of nihilism or magic, I argue, second, that the nihilistic option is deeply incoherent. Thus, while we are accustomed to thinking of science as investigating the realm of what is real, we must accept that meaning, normativity, and agency are real and yet remarkably discontinuous with the subject matter of natural science.