On Human Identity

Hello my name is __________. Have you signed in someplace and been given one of these stickers to fill out? Who am I? Well, my name is Patrick Raymond Maloney. That’s a start to the answer to the question, who am I. I have a name, I was born on a day, at a time, in a place, to a set of parents and in a certain circumstance. That additional data, which is on my Birth Certificate, provides more detail than just my name. I would presume there are probably several humans who may also have my same name to confuse the matter of identification. Curious, I looked it up and one answer to the probability of similarly named individuals (all three names) could be 1 in 460 million, so with a total population just above 8 billion that would be about 18 of us Patrick Raymond Maloneys. Hmmm

Perhaps stepping further into identifying me, one could then also search out biological evidence such as fingerprints or even DNA. That, science would tell us is 1 in 8.3 billion humans alive today. And the probability that anyone, current or past, in all of human history, shares my exact fingerprints or DNA is essentially zero. That makes me, and you as well, absolutely unique in a physically distinguishing way. Remarkable. Yet does that data tell us who we are? Who is the person who has needs, experiences, emotions and performs the behaviors we’ve been discussing?

All too often, I encounter people who may make a close identification of themselves and their needs, experiences, emotions or behavior tendencies. I am what I need. I am what has happened to me. I am what I feel. I am what I do or have done. Thinking back to the above scenario of introducing yourself to others, it can be very common for men, for example, to follow up their name with their role, profession or job title. I am a counselor, engineer, doctor, lawyer, accountant, CEO, craftsman or just a ________. We identify positively or negatively with our role or relationships, our place in the family or organization or society. Again, a bit more data about some details which could locate us, but is that who I am? Sometimes we fear we are a fluke or a mistake or wonder if we were born in the wrong time.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Both life and the times in which we live are given to us, says Gandalf, or more precisely, J.R.R. Tolkien as the author who wrote the story.

One of the gifts of being a parent is the responsibility of naming our children. But I believe most every parent knows that we may have contributed to the DNA of our children, but we receive our children, already made, with unique elements of temperament, personality, disposition, gifts – pre-made in much of their form, just as we received the gift of design from our author. A newborn does not create himself, he receives existence. I am not merely my physical body, nor what has happened to me, what I feel, what I need, or what I do; I am a person whose fundamental worth precedes all of those things.

The sciences increasingly reveal that the human person is a being who develops through relationship, progressively acquires agency and identity, seeks belonging and meaning, becomes capable of self-giving and generativity, and ultimately confronts dependence, aging and death. The natural development progression can be described to look like this chain: body → brain → attachment → cognition → emotional regulation → identity → relationships → mature agency → generativity → aging. Regarding the sciences, consider:

Biology tells you how the organism develops.

Psychology tells you how the person develops psychologically.

History tells you how development is shaped through others and circumstances.

Philosophy asks what kind of being is developing.

Theology reveals the destiny toward which the person is called.

Christian anthropology reads this developmental journey within the larger story: the person is first received as gift, discovers himself in relationship, is called to freely give himself in love, and finds his ultimate fulfillment not in autonomous self-creation but in communion with the God in whose image he was created.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” As recorded in Jeremiah 1:5

“God is the sovereign creator and orchestrator who causes all things to work together for good.” according to Romans 8:28.

With an identity which comes from God, the originator - good loving creator, then what comes with it are: personhood, dignity, worth, freedom, vocation, createdness.

Imago Dei. Made in the image of God. Not once, long ago, in a garden — but now, today, in you, in the person sitting across from me in the counseling room, in the eighteen other Patrick Raymond Maloneys somewhere on the planet I'll likely never meet. Imago Dei. Made in God's image. It's worth slowing down on what that actually means, because it's easy to let the phrase pass by without connection to the work it's meant to do.

Genesis doesn't wait to see what humanity will accomplish before pronouncing a verdict. God creates, and then God declares — good, and good, and good again, six times over, before finally, after making the human person, very good. Notice the order. The goodness comes first. Nothing has been built yet, nothing earned, no résumé assembled. The declaration precedes the doing.

Some may object here. Doesn't science already explain where we came from? Hasn't the fossil record, hasn't genetics, hasn't a century of paleoanthropology already told us the story of the human body — where it arose, when, from what populations, through what long and branching process?

Yes, as far as it goes thus far. And none of that touches the question I'm actually asking.

There's a difference between how a thing came to be and what it is — between the biological history of the organism and the identity of the person. Science can trace the body's origin further and further back into deep time; it has done exactly that for the last century, revising itself again and again as new evidence appeared. Neanderthals were once drawn as brutish outliers; now we know many of us carry their DNA. The clean line from "original man" to "primitive man" to "modern man" has given way to something messier and more interesting — a branching, interbreeding, wandering population history. That's not science failing. That's science being science: a model that gets better precisely because it's willing to be revised.

But notice what that revision can never touch. Suppose next year someone found evidence that pushed our lineage back another million years. Would that change what makes a human being a human being? Would it alter human dignity, human freedom, the capacity for love, the burden of moral obligation? It would not. Because the answer to what is a person was never resting on the answer to how old is the body. Those are different questions, asked by different disciplines, and one doesn't settle the other. Biological origin, personal identity, and ultimate origin — three separate questions, easily confused, each deserving its own honest answer.

This is, I think, what Genesis is actually doing. It was never competing with a lab report. It doesn't hand us a chronology to defend against the next fossil find. It hands us something science was never built to give: that we are creatures, that creation is good, that the human person bears God's own image, that we are embodied and relational and free — and that we misuse that freedom, and that God's answer to the damage is not abandonment but redemption. A carbon date can't confirm or deny a single one of those claims, because they aren't claims about when. They're claims about why.