Every human has a right to life. But why?

For most of us today, every life is precious. We see life as valuable in its own right.

But this assumption wasn’t the case in ancient times.

In the Greco-Roman world – the world in which Christianity first emerged – it was not uncommon to find babies discarded like rubbish on the dumps outside the city.

A surviving letter from around the year 1BC written by the Roman soldier Hillarian – which we’ve featured on the show a few times now – from his pregnant wife in Egypt shows just how un-shocking the practice was.

“Know that I am still in Alexandria. I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I receive payment, I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered before I come home, if it is a boy, keep it; if it is a girl, discard it.”

Compare that with this statement from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), drafted in Paris, 1948:

The General Assembly proclaims … All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

How could it possibly be—Hillarion might ask —that every human being, regardless of their capacities or usefulness, is equally valuable?

On what basis can we make such an arbitrary claim? Are all animals in the sale yard equally valuable? Is all art equally valuable? Are all tools or weapons, or food, equally valuable? Nature herself has made some people smarter, stronger, better … and therefore more useful. The more useful, the more valuable. We should prefer the strong and useful, and let Nature take care of the rest.

The founding fathers of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were said to have been abandoned and were later rescued and nurtured by a she-wolf. This statue of the wolf was thought to have been made in the 5th century BC, with the baby twins added later in the 15th century AD.

This idea of ‘survival belonging to the strongest ’ has been proposed by a who’s who of philosophers and thinkers throughout history, including Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, and even in Darwinian theory. Only when we feel the force of this cold pagan logic are we in a position to see how Christianity – building on its Jewish origins – repudiated the ancient view of the human being, and laid the foundation of the modern “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family”.

This idea is what it means to say that human beings are made “in the image of God”. It’s not just some throwaway line at the front of the Bible. It’s a statement about the inherent value of all humans, regardless of their capacity.

Right from the beginning of the Bible, it’s established that humans are made in God’s image, and are the climax of all creation:

Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

So God created humans in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

 (Genesis chapter 1)

This is vastly different to the place of humans in other religious traditions emerging from the Near East.

In those myths – such as the Babylonian Enuma Elis – humans were the last thing made because they were an afterthought.

So, what is the image of God?

For starters, it’s not something like rationality or consciousness.

“The problem with saying that the image of God is attached to our rationality is that we have varying degrees of rational thought,” Carmen Joy Imes said, speaking on Undeceptions. 

“Would you say that an older adult who’s experiencing dementia is no longer the image of God as they lose their rational capacities? I think ethically it becomes very important to recognise that rationality is not the basis for the image of God.”

Instead, Imes posits that being in the image of God is attained by simply existing. Regardless of capacities and usefulness, you matter to God.

“The language of ‘image of God’ is what tells us where the dignity comes from”, she said. “We live in a culture that’s constantly looking inside to find some internal moral grounding or internal compass for finding out who we are and why we’re here, and without recognising that we’re in God’s image, we can’t achieve that.”

This idea of the inherent value of humanity was so influential that it undergirds much of Western ethics today, including the UDHR. 

Atheists like the German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas have spotted the significance of all this: 

“Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom, human rights and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. To this day, there is no alternative to it.”

That doesn’t mean that people aren’t trying to come up with alternatives, though

“The thing that Christianity provides is a sense that this is a true story, a story that permeates the entire sweep of history, the entire sweep of the cosmos, that there is a God, and that therefore the values that Christianity has taught are not just culturally contingent, and not just bread of kind of historical happenstance, but are fundamentally true”, Tom Holland, host of The Rest is History and author of Dominion said, appearing on Undeceptions back in 2021.

“While of course, it’s perfectly true that the atheists have morals, it doesn’t alter the fact that those morals are basically Christian, and that if you lack the theological, supernatural explanation for why these values should be held, where do you get them? 

“I think the intellectual history of the past few decades has basically been a kind of gathering attempt to try and explain Christian values and Christian teachings in ways that do not depend upon Christianity being true, and I think it’s proven to be a struggle personally.”

Adapted by Alasdair Belling from Undeceptions episode 174, ‘God’s Image’. You can listen to the full episode here.

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