Less of a Man?

In this year's London Olympics, a runner by the name of Oscar Pistorius, who is a double-amputee and runs with prostheses that look like blades, attempted to qualify for the 400-m men's final.  He did not make it to the big race, but Oscar will go down as an unforgettable character in these games.  A little controversy surrounded him initially as critics wondered if his prostheses would give him an advantage.  In the end he was allowed to run.

This situation got me to thinking about what it means to be human.  Here's why.  The materialist message we get from our culture, especially from the scientific community, is that we are nothing but matter, meat and bones all the way down.  No soul or spirit that can't be accounted for by the firing of neurons or shifting of chemicals.

Here's the thought I had in relation to Oscar and this materialist message: if it's true that all we are is ultimately meat robots, then when a person loses a limb and becomes an amputee, then it is absolutely true that he is less of a man.  He is not the man he was before.  His body has changed, and since all he is is a body, then he's not the same.  He is less.  But this doesn't seem to match our own sense of ourselves. 

What if the materialists are wrong and we are more than sum of our parts?  Then Oscar's body has indeed changed, but he is not less of a person.  Notice I used the word person here and not man as used previously.  If we have souls then our bodies may change, but our person-hood remains unaffected.  By the way, this accounts for a phenomenon that we all notice as we age.  Clearly as we advance in years our bodies change: we get shorter, greyer, heavier, ricketier, and more forgetful.  But we still have this sense that we are the same person.  This body that we animate gets older, but we "still feel like a teenager," as older folk are often heard to say.

All of this to say that if we are nothing but physical stuff, we do indeed change and become less over time.  This materialist diminution of ourselves plays right into the hand of the euthanasia crowd.  If we are less, why keep us around?  But if the theists are right (those of us who believe in a God), then we can account for personal continuity regardless of how our outer shell is affected by the world.  God has created us not only with a body, but also a soul that animates that body.

So maybe Oscar the man is not less of a person after all.