c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(at)compuserve.com.)

(UNDATED) The keepers of the Copenhagen Zoo recently enclosed two new specimens in a glass-walled cage at the primate house: a pair of Homo sapiens. I know. Why would anyone go to the zoo to see a couple of people when they’ve probably got a couple of them living in their own house, and at least one of them living inside their own skin?

The answer should be obvious. For enlightenment.

Indeed, the exhibit was intended to make a larger ideological point: The Darwinian view that people are little different from the great apes, and perhaps even the lesser apes. Zookeeper Peter Vestergaard, sounding much like a television therapist, pronounced that the exhibit would force people to “confront their origins,” which might cause them to “accept” that “we are all primates.”

Similarly, specimen Henrik Lehmann (the male) added that humans and apes share 98.5 percent of the same chromosomes. “Only 1.5 percent separates us from the monkeys,” he announced, to the considerable appreciation of the female, named Malene Botoft.

Yet what a strange difference that 1.5 percent makes. While their neighbors were busy staring at the ceiling, swinging from bars and picking lice from one another’s pelts, the Homo sapiens read books, checked e-mail with their computer, sent and received faxes and, when necessary, adjusted the air conditioning. In his spare moments, Henrik worked on motorcycles, leaving his neighbors to no doubt rue this unpleasant fact of life: “But for 1.5 percent more chromosomes and I’d be riding a Harley.”

The differences did not end there. Unlike Tommy the Orangutan, the humans were free to leave their “cage” whenever they encountered the primitive urge for a movie, a candlelight dinner or a night at the opera (the Monkey House Opera Company, its seems, puts on an exceedingly shabby performance).

Our humans also refused to publicly heed the call of nature, which other primates are fond of doing, and when Lehmann was asked whether he and Botoft would display “intimate behavior” in front of spectators, he sniffed, “That’s not interesting.”

While that last statement would suggest that perhaps Henrik is from another planet (for many humans would pay good money for such a display), his insistence that humans are little different from the apes is old hat (Apes don’t wear hats, zoo visitors no doubt also noticed). Nor, for that matter, is the idea that man is not much different from any other creature. According to this philosophy, humans are merely a variation on an evolutionary theme, and a slight variation at that.

G.K. Chesterton, a well-known Homo sapiens author, wrote about this in his classic book, “The Everlasting Man.” Chesterton, a great lover of art and literature, makes many telling points, among them that of all the creatures on this earth, humans are the only ones to decorate their homes with art. A person can dig very deep into human history and find where a man had drawn a picture of a reindeer on a cave wall, he observes. “But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man.”

The rejoinder to this is that in the great scheme of things the creation of art, music, computers, shoes, toothbrushes and the rest of what many of us consider life’s necessities is hardly a big deal. Critics of Chesterton’s view will point out that, after all, birds make nests, just as we make houses. Responds the sage: “If (the bird) built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within. But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him and us, like the window on which a bird will beat in vain.”

Which raises a central question: Why are some people so intent on breaking through that pane of glass? For the purpose of huddling nearer the bird, the reindeer, and the ape?

Because naturalistic theory, which holds that man is just one more product of a common ancestral bacterium, cannot abide the idea that man is a creature unto himself. To suggest as much is to concede that perhaps man does bear the image of a divine Creator. And to admit that could lead to all sorts of disasters, including nondenominational prayers at high school graduations. Better to ignore astounding differences than to admit the possibility of an even more astounding origin.

“It is not natural to see man as a natural product,” Chesterton concludes. “It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against the broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality.”

It happens that Henrik and Malene have left the monkey house and returned to their normal jobs. While they would probably not admit it, one hopes that the short amount of time they spent among the monkeys might have convinced them that their neighbors were somehow beneath them.

END COLSON