Our Endangered Garden
109
into particular cases, it is important as the final step in this chapter to address a question especially salient for any form of relation between human and non-human forms of life? Are there any valid reasons to grant human distinctiveness without thereby demeaning the humanism. What is the
status and stature of non-human life? Why not join some form of neohu-manism, Heideggerian or ecological, in response to the challenges of our technological and global age? While the following chapters of this book set forth a picture of human responsibility in exemplary domains of life, a few
words are needed at this point in the argument. These thoughts focus, again, on the differences between hypertheism, overhumanization, and theological humanism.Classical theism holds that God is supremely important and real and the
one in relation to whom the rest of reality draws its being and its worth. Classical theism is, accordingly, radically has worth. In most theistic traditions, especially the great monotheistic faiths, human beings have distinctive worth because of their special relation to theocentric in its conception of what
God, say, created in God’s image, as it is put in the Bible, or, according to the Qu’ran, God’s viceregents. In a theistic outlook, intrinsic value derives from a relation to God, and human beings (however defined) have a unique rela-tion to the deity, unlike the rest of the created order. (^25) Theism defines the
point of life in terms of share in a distinctive way in God’s future.period. The theistic outlook linked God as the highest value to human Classical theism has been under relentless attack throughout the modern conformity to God’s will, and, further, human beings
beings as possessing unique worth in relation to other forms of life. Theism seems to denigrate the natural world and pictures non-human animals as instrumental to human flourishing. With the breakdown of this theistic outlook there emerges both anthropocentric value orientations, usually
associated with humanism and overhumanization, and, conversely, non-anthropocentric outlooks that have taken religious form, in hypertheism, and also non-religious expression, say, in ecological holism. Many contem-porary people believe that human beings alone possess intrinsic worth, and,
accordingly, the natural world and non-human animals have their worth in relation to human beings. Conversely, others argue that the value of human life is interdependent with larger patterns and processes of reality and it is the larger wholes, not human life, that have intrinsic worth. If that is the case, it
is justified to put limits on human flourishing for the sake of the patterns and processes of which we are a part.positiThis chapter has already charted some of the arguments of these two ons in the various ways they appear within the current debate about