What It Means to Be Human
I was on the train this week. Nearby sat a group of six people. All of them were talking, but no one was listening. Each voice climbed over the others, rising in volume and insistence. What struck me wasn’t just the noise—but the absence of communion. It wasn’t conversation. It was a kind of performative disconnection, a chorus of monologues in search of an audience.
And yet, is that not the world we live in?
We’re increasingly surrounded by sound but starved of meaning. We inhabit a culture that values expression over reflection, talking over listening, presence over essence. The moment reminded me of Blaise Pascal’s sharp insight:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
— Pensées
Pascal understood that our flight from silence is a flight from ourselves. We fear what we might find in the quiet. We fear the vast questions that rise when all the distractions fall away—questions like: Who am I? Why am I here? What does it mean to be human?
We’ve made impressive progress understanding the mechanics of life. We know about the spin of electrons and the sweep of galaxies, the helix of DNA and the geometry of black holes. But ask a child, a professor, or a family member what it means to be human, and the answers blur. We can decode genes but not purpose.
And that tells us something vital.
Our knowledge is expanding, but our meaning is collapsing. The more we explain the how, the more we lose sight of the why.
So let me begin with a premise—one many try to ignore in their rush to explain the world without wonder:
There is a Grand Designer.
This is not blind faith. It is, in many ways, the most rational response to the evidence before us. From the elegant structure of the double helix to the flight of a bird; from the fine-tuning of universal constants to the moral intuition that kindness is better than cruelty—we are surrounded by what C.S. Lewis called “signposts” pointing beyond themselves.
Design suggests a Designer. Beauty implies a source. Order reflects a Mind.
More than that, this Designer cannot be simply within the universe, subject to its laws and limits. He must be outside of time and space—uncaused, eternal, and personal. For impersonal forces do not craft poetry or conscience or consciousness. Only a person can create persons.
And if this Designer shaped human beings, then it stands to reason He had a purpose in doing so.
Existential philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard wrote of the despair that arises when humans live without a sense of purpose. He saw the “sickness unto death” as not physical but spiritual—a loss of self through disconnection from the eternal. When we deny transcendence, we don’t gain freedom; we lose orientation.
If we are the products of a loving and benevolent Creator, then our nature must in some way reflect His nature.
The fruits of that nature are not hard to imagine. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control.
These are not mere social constructs. They are echoes of a moral original. We sense their goodness because we are designed to flourish by them.
And if you sit quietly in a room—really quietly—you will begin to feel the ache of that design. A longing for meaning, for reconciliation, for permanence. As Lewis observed, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Try thinking of an alternative. Can a chemical accident produce the longing for eternal love? Can chance explain the moral outrage we feel at injustice? Can meaning itself arise from a meaningless source? No one on their right mind would say this is a happy world. But what about living in a world where the qualities above would flourish.
If not, then this—this is what it means to be human:
To be a created being, conscious and free, moral and mortal, made in the image of a Creator who intended us for something more than survival—for something eternal. A future eternal life for those found worthy by groping and finding the creator, something we must do away from the noise.
And only in silence can we begin to hear that truth.
His purpose in all this was that people of every culture and religion would search for this ultimate God, grope for Him in the darkness, as it were, hoping to find Him. Yet, in truth, God is not far from any of us. Acts 17:27 (TV).
Scripture quotations marked (TV) are taken from The Voice™. Copyright © 2008 by Ecclesia Bible Society. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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