Blog
The illusion and danger of seeing ourselves as exceptional
Tuesday 26th August 2025
Mike Mullins
From earliest times belief systems, religions and philosophies have asserted that we, homo sapiens, are somehow “special”. By special I mean different from the usual, or ordinary, in a way that’s better unique, or important. That we stand out from the rest of nature. For thousands of years, we have lived as if we are not animals and sought ways to assert our exceptionalism.
Early hunter gatherers saw humans as having a unique relationship with spirits, ancestors and nature. Their myths gave human beings a central role, the children of creators, mediators between worlds, or the very reason why the world exists.
In early Sumerian, Egyptian, Indus and Chinese civilisation humans were made to serve gods and were often fashioned from divine materials. Egyptian pharaohs were seen as divine giving humans a cosmic ruler role.
During the Axial age (800-200 BC) Plato and Aristotle claimed humans were unique because of their capacity for reason and morality. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism all claimed humans were unique because of our capacity for enlightenment, or liberation. Whilst Confucianism claimed humanity was unique because we had a moral duty to develop moral virtue.
The Abrahamic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam, went one step further with the strongest claim to “specialness,” teaching that man was created in the image of God, imago dei, and was given stewardship over creation.
In mediaeval Christian and Islamic philosophy humans were special because of their reason and moral will. Scholastic thinkers like Aquinas argued humans were special because they, unlike any other animals, had immortal souls.
During the renaissance and enlightenment, in a return to the ideas of the classical period, man was celebrated for his specialness on account of his creativity, reason and dignity. Universal human rights were emphasised on the basis of mans rational nature.
Modern science with the likes of Charles Darwin, may have challenged the idea of humans being biologically separate but science still pushed exceptionalism noting supposed unique traits in man like language, abstract thought, culture, cumulative knowledge, our capacity for symbolic reasoning, technology and collaboration as unparalleled. Secular creeds like humanism make much of their liberation from superstition, yet still rely on species membership as some magical boundary.
This is not to say there are not clear differences between us and other sentient beings. But the idea that there’s something unique about us, that species membership is a magical boundary, is becoming increasingly hard to justify. We have a split in the human condition. We see the human world as the highest good, human flourishing as all important. We have a deeply uneasy relationship with being animal.
Whilst asserting the specialness and dignity of human beings, their being made in the image of God, has had tremendous benefits in promoting compassion and human rights, the belief in human exceptionalism can also have harmful, unforeseen consequences.
Perhaps our challenge is to relearn that we belong to mother earth that we are animal in all the loveliness and beauty that entails.
Let's explore both the evolutionary and spiritual perspectives that argue against the idea of humans being inherently "special" or having a unique cosmic purpose above other creatures.
Despite what many believe evolution doesn’t involve a direction. It can progress from single cell to multicellular or back. From an evolutionary, atheistic, standpoint, humans are one species among millions, the result of the same natural processes—random mutation, natural selection, genetic drift and adaptation that shape all life. So, the idea of humans being a “pinnacle” or purpose of evolution is a teleological fallacy (projecting purpose onto a purposeless process).
Though many catholic theologians and scientists Teilhard de Chardin, Kenneth Miller and Stephen Barr would dispute that, arguing that the divine works through evolution and her purpose is to express her joy through the act of creation, an eternal becoming, by emptying herself (kenosis) into becoming all beings. So, all being, all life, are the divine’s purpose. Homo sapiens, we, appeared very late in the story of life on this earth, 300,000 years ago (at 23.58, two minutes to midnight, if the life of the 4.5-billion-year-old earth was compressed into 24 hours). So, claiming that we are the central and sole purpose of creation is rather like asserting that the actor who only appears in the end credits of a film is the central character.
If you rewound the evolutionary clock, humans—at least homo sapiens as we know them—might never have evolved. Many evolutionary biologists (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould) emphasized the role of chance and contingency in evolution. This questions the notion of humans as inevitable, or being a privileged outcome. It also suggests that in the act of creation the divine limited itself, embraced uncertainty and a degree of powerlessness.
“God is weak and powerless in the world and that is the way the only way in which he can be with us and help us” Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It challenges our Abrahamic notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing God. This has parallels with the Christian notion of kenosis and the Jewish Kabbalistic idea of Tzimtzum, “Withdrawal”. The 16th century mystic Isaac Luria taught that the Ein Sof (God the infinite) withdrew to allow space for creation, placing limits on herself.
Genetically, we share 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees. Many behaviours (tool use, empathy, grief, cooperation, self awareness, reflection) once thought uniquely human are now seen in other species. Our intelligence is quantitatively different but not necessarily qualitatively distinct. Before Homo sapiens, several other hominin species (members of the human lineage after the split from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees) played key roles in human evolution. The most important ones were Australopithecus afarensis, 3.9–2.9 million years ago. Homo habilis 2.4–1.4 million years ago. Homo erectus 1.9 million–110,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis 700,000–200,000 years ago. Homo neanderthalensis 400,000–40,000 years ago. Homo floresiensis and Homo naledi 100,000–50,000 years ago, Homo floresiensis, 335,000–236,000 years ago. Neanderthals were 99.7% genetically similar to us. Homo erectus and earlier Homo species likely to have a 97–99% similarity. Whilst Australopithecus is estimated to be 95–97% similar based on morphology and evolutionary distance. So, on what basis do we assume we’re special, set apart, compared to these hominins? Especially when the evidence suggests we may have lived alongside some of them, bred with them and maybe even killed them. Perhaps they are just our older sisters and brothers in the divine family? Equally loved and special to the divine.
From a biological lens, all species equally evolved for their niche. A bacterium, a dolphin, a redwood tree. They’ve all “succeeded” in evolutionary terms by surviving and reproducing. No species is in that sense is "higher" or "lower." Evolution is dendritic (tree like) it’s not a hierarchical pyramid. So, from evolutionary perspective, there's no justification for human exceptionalism, just species-specific traits shaped by environment and chance.
Some spiritual traditions often affirm human specialness and superiority. For example, Christianity speaks of humans being made in the image of God and this has a led in a very positive way to the notion of human dignity and human rights. Other strands of world spirituality and mysticism actually reject the notion of humans being uniquely special and above other creatures.
In Hindu Vedanta, Buddhism and Taoism, the self is not separate from the rest of existence. They have a non dualistic outlook. All beings share the same fundamental essence (e.g., Brahman, Buddha-nature, Tao, or in Christian mysticism the divine spark or “isness”). Arguably seeing humans as uniquely important and separate because of their “uniqueness” or "specialness" creates ego, illusion (maya) alienation, ultimately suffering, the othering and exploitation of nature.
Indigenous, animistic, and Earth-based spiritualities (e.g., many Native American and African traditions) emphasize that all life is sacred. Humans are part of a web, not above it. Animals, trees, rivers all have spirit, agency and purpose. These spiritualties talk about our kinship with the other than human, a family model, rather than a patriarchal hierarchy: God, angels, man, woman, animals, plants soil etc.
Many mystics (e.g., Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Rumi, Laozi) stress humility before the divine mystery. The idea that humans are the universe’s central concern is seen as arrogant. In many ways it is our deep fear of being animal, our fear of suffering, of pain, of anxiety, of loneliness and death that makes us assert our exceptionalism, that we are more than animal. Spiritual maturity involves learning to overcome our fear of being animal and embracing our smallness, our humility, our place in the family of being, not our centrality.
Just because we are not central doesn’t mean we’re not loved, adored by the divine. The last child in a large family isn’t loved any less for being last. Likewise, the world does not revolve round us because were the last child in the family. We’re part of a wider family of all sentient beings in which all are in the image of the divine and loved by the divine. As the Roman Catholic Franciscan and mystic Richard Rohr says, “God love all things by becoming all things”.
If humans are viewed as uniquely special, the pinnacle of creation, it can foster disregard for other beings—animals, ecosystems and even the Earth itself—justifying domination and exploitation rather than coexistence.
Spiritually, this reinforces separation and arrogance, strengthening the ego’s illusion of superiority. Many traditions, from Buddhism and Taoism to the mystical branches of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, warn that such ego-centred views block deeper realisation of our interconnectedness with all life, with the universe.
When humans are seen as outside or above the web of life, spiritual experience risks becoming abstract rather than embodied, estranged from our bodies, nature and the cosmos. Thinkers such as the Roman Catholic scholar Thomas Berry, the Buddhist activist Joanna Macy, and deep ecology philosophers argue that this belief in human specialness fuels ecological exploitation and destruction.
From a spiritual perspective, human supremacy is thus a form of spiritual ego—a barrier to enlightenment, harmony, and reverence for life. Seeing ourselves as “above” other lifeforms feeds the illusion of separation and becomes a mindset easily manipulated to justify the objectification, exploitation, and destruction of the natural world.