Anthropology--the study of man--is unlike every other study
because humans are its subject. And because we are its subject we
cannot manage the philosophic and emotional distance necessary to
see clearly. Unable to stand apart from ourselves to comprehend our
own truth, we are compelled to assume things about ourselves that
we cannot prove. In a word, anthropology begins in faith. Lloyd
Sandelands approaches the anthropological quest for God by
comparing the faiths of modern social science and of the Christian
church.
Sandelands describes the social scientific faith articulated by
Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Schopenhauer among others, as an imagined
state of nature that sees the individual as solitary,
self-sufficient, and contented. By contrast, the Christian faith
unites us as male and female persons in one flesh before God. The
challenge in the author's view is to decide which faith to build
our lives upon. Sandelands poses questions about the basic terms of
human study--what is a person, and what is society?--and how do the
different metaphysics of science and Church lead to different
anthropologies?
A worthwhile anthropology must address the questions of what
constitutes human freedom, desire, and the nature of the good.
Comparing the answers given by science and by the church, he finds
that the one paradoxically denies freedom, denies want, and denies
the good, while the other affirms freedom, affirms want, and
affirms the good. Between these two anthropologies he finds there
is but one true study of man.
A companion to Sandelands' "Man and Nature in God," his most
recent book, "An Anthropological Defense of God" attempts to
establish that an anthropology in God succeeds where an
anthropology in science fails. Such success is measured not only by
its ideas and findings about man, but even more by its wisdom in
teaching us how to live.
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