We Cannot Stay Human Without God

What does it mean to be human? This question, once reserved for theologians, philosophers, and poets, has become a battleground in our time a place where ancient truths collide with modern ideologies. If we don’t recover a proper understanding of our humanity, we will not be able to lead our homes, educate our children, govern our nations, or shepherd our churches. We must remember who we are, or we will be shaped into something we were never meant to become.

At the heart of this crisis lies a forgotten truth: that to stay human, we must live within the boundaries set by the God who made us. This is the message C.S. Lewis delivered powerfully in The Abolition of Man and his Ransom Trilogy works that have become prophetic in their accuracy.

Two Anchors of Humanity

Scripture presents two non-negotiable truths about human nature:

1. We are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), with inherent worth, dignity, and a calling to live in relationship with our Creator.

2. We are fallen (Romans 3:23), not merely misinformed or disadvantaged, but spiritually broken and morally bent.

Without both of these truths, any philosophy of man collapses. Remove the first, and human life becomes disposable. Remove the second, and human pride grows unchecked, believing it can perfect itself. In either case, the result is a distorted, dehumanized version of what God intended.

Lewis and the Fight for the Soul

C.S. Lewis saw this war on human nature coming long before most. In The Abolition of Man, he warns that if we continue teaching generations that truth and beauty are subjective and morality is fluid, we will raise "men without chests” people disconnected from the virtues that make life worth living. They will have minds to reason and bodies to crave but no heart to guide them.

This metaphor the “chest” represents the seat of properly ordered affections. Without it, our reason serves our appetites rather than guiding them. And as Lewis warned, a society that mocks virtue and honor should not be surprised when it is overrun by cowardice and betrayal.

Education as Formation, Not Propaganda

Lewis draws a sharp line between two kinds of education. The first, rooted in the Judeo-Christian worldview, treats children as image-bearers to be trained in virtue. The second treats them as programmable machines to be adjusted for whatever social goals the culture desires. The former is propagation passing on manhood to men. The latter is propaganda molding people for ends they never chose.

The difference is not academic it is anthropological. When educators reject the existence of objective truth and morality, they don’t stop shaping students they simply shape them in the image of their own biases. The result? A generation unmoored from reality, yet told they are free.

The Tao: A Universal Moral Law

Lewis uses the term “Tao” to describe the universal moral law written into the fabric of our world and into every human conscience. While the term comes from Eastern thought, Lewis uses it to describe the same law affirmed by Moses, Jesus, Plato, and Augustine. It tells us what is right, even when we don’t feel like doing it. It reminds us we are not the source of truth, but subject to it.

Denying the Tao does not free us; it enslaves us to the most powerful voice in the room or worse, to our own impulses. And when societies try to create new values apart from the Tao, all they do is distort fragments of it into dangerous ideologies.

When Virtue Becomes Vice

In Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis introduces Ransom, a materialistic academic kidnapped and taken to Mars. There, among unfallen creatures living in harmony, Ransom discovers the depth of his own ignorance and pride. Through them, he begins to regain his “chest” to see that courage, honor, and truth are not relics, but realities.

In contrast, Weston, a mad scientist, clings to a twisted version of virtue: the survival of the human species. Stripped from the Tao, this instinct becomes monstrous. Weston believes he must dominate other worlds for the “greater good,” unable to see the evil he’s become.

This is how modern ideologies work. They take one good justice, progress, safety and elevate it above all others, abandoning the balance of the Tao. What follows is not liberation, but chaos.

Tempted to Be Like God

In Perelandra, Ransom arrives on a newly created Venus, where he must stop Weston (now demon-possessed) from tempting a new “Eve” into rebellion. Weston’s temptation sounds eerily familiar: Don’t wait on God become like Him. Follow your heart. Decide for yourself what is good. Why accept limits when you could be “fully yourself”?

This is not just the lie of Eden it’s the anthem of the modern age.

We tell ourselves that to be free is to self-define. To be human is to cast off limits, rewrite truth, and “live our truth.” But this doesn’t make us gods. It makes us slaves to our own cravings.

Lewis understood: the only way to remain human is to live within the boundaries set by our Creator. Anything else is a slow unmaking of the soul.

The Final Step: Abolishing Man

In the final chapter of The Abolition of Man, Lewis describes a future where the “Conditioners” elite planners use science to re-engineer humanity. Their tools are not love or truth, but manipulation and genetic control. What they create may look like humans, but they are not. They are products, not people shaped not by virtue, but by the whims of those in power.

And even the Conditioners are not free. Having rejected the Tao, they are ruled by their own appetites. In trying to conquer nature, they become its servants. In trying to rise above their humanity, they abolish it.

This chilling future is no longer fiction. Today’s debates over gender, identity, transhumanism, and AI all point in one direction: a growing belief that human nature is infinitely malleable and that anyone who says otherwise is oppressive.

But we must remember: we cannot redefine humanity without destroying it.

The Room That Reminds Us

In That Hideous Strength, the climax of Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, a man named Mark is nearly seduced into joining a totalitarian organization, N.I.C.E., bent on reprogramming humanity. To desensitize him to truth and beauty, they put him in a deliberately twisted room full of lopsided art and illogical design.

But something unexpected happens. The absurdity of the room awakens in Mark a yearning for what is “straight and true.” For the first time, he realizes: something solid exists. A real normal. Not constructed. Not subjective. Not invented. Just real.

That realization saves his soul.

How to Stay Human in a Post-Human Age

We are all walking through lopsided rooms today shaped by screens, slogans, and social pressure. But if we listen closely, we will hear the voice of truth, calling us back. We are not just products of biology. We are not self-made. We are image-bearers, broken and in need of redemption, but glorious nonetheless.

To stay human:

• Remember the imago Dei. You are not an accident. You are made with purpose, by a personal God.

• Live within the Tao. There is a moral order. Find it in Scripture. Love it. Teach it to your children.

• Guard your chest. Feed your affections with truth, goodness, and beauty. Starve the lies.

• Resist the lopsided room. Don’t let the distortion of culture steal your ability to recognize what is real.

• Trust Christ. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life the perfect embodiment of the Tao and the Redeemer of our fallen humanity.

The battle for humanity is not over. But we can still win it not by asserting our independence, but by reclaiming our dependence on the One who made us.

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