Luther\u27s Existential Imago Dei, the Deprivation Thesis, and Sanctity of Life

On Ryan Peterson’s reading of Martin Luther, the imago Dei (iD) is a human’s capacity to experience God. Traditionally, Christians have understood the iD to be a property that a) qualitatively separates all human beings from all non-human animals and b) gives humans a greater moral worth than non-human animals. If Peterson’s Luther is right, humans made in the iD and no other material created things have the capacity to experience God, and this capacity makes them worth more, morally, than non-human animals. I defend this conception of the distinctness of humans by demonstrating the following: For any human being p, the potentiality of p’s life for including experiences of God entails that p’s life is potentially extrinsically better than the lives of all non-human animals. This, in turn, makes p’s life worth more, morally, than the lives of any non-human animals. First, I state the conditions of an experience of God. Second, I show that, plausibly, only the lives of humans with the capacity for having aesthetic experiences have the potentiality for including experiences of God. Third, I show how instantiated experiences of God can be of such high moral worth that they make entire lives worth more, morally, than all others without such experiences of God. Killing humans may be ipso facto worse than killing non-human animals in virtue of their possible future experiences of God. I discuss some of the implications of this understanding of the iD, including the possibility of the iD for severely cognitively impaired humans and the impossibility of iD for non-human animals. Importantly, this formulation of iD spares the “sanctity of life” doctrine from its most scathing critiques by philosophers like Peter Singer. It shows, at minimum, that it is logically possible that the iD is something that is both a) applicable to all humans and b) attributes a morally relevant status to humans that cannot be attributed to non-human animals. At most, it presents a novel and insightful way to view the iD and the badness of death