Why Your Friend is a Furry: Genesis 1 & Metaphysics

The date is March 22, 2022. In the most powerful empire in the modern world, a judge is being interviewed for confirmation to the nation’s most venerable office. And here, in the storied halls of the United States Congress, the nominee cannot answer a preschool question: “what is a woman?” Ketanji Brown Jackson’s (non) answer to this question was mocked across the internet, but it is far from an isolated incident. There is hardly a church in America that has not had a rebellious child leave their midst, incensed that their family refuses to recognize their new ‘gender identity.’ In all this confusion and sorrow, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the conflict between Christians and non-Christians is not just about belief in Jesus, but it involves two completely different conceptions of reality itself. The choice is stark. On the one hand, there are those who believe reality is socially constructed: even biological sex is viewed as a mere cultural norm that can be cast aside as soon as it feels uncomfortable. On the other hand, there is the Christian view: reality is created by God, who intentionally and irrevocably orders it according to his good purpose. As Christians in today’s world, it is not enough to resist the fruits of secular ideology (e.g., transgenderism); we must also resist the view of reality that undergirds it.^[1] To do this, we need a fully-orbed Christian view of reality.

1. Carl Trueman rightly recognizes that the view that an individual can change genders at will involves an entire re-definition of reality, not just by individuals, but by society as a whole. See Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020).

Today, we often call such a view of reality a “worldview,” but there is an older philosophical word that reaches more deeply to the heart of the issue: metaphysics. Metaphysics is the study of reality itself: what is ultimately real? Whereas worldview puts the emphasis on us (i.e., the viewer of the world), metaphysics puts the emphasis on the structures of reality itself. As Christians, we need both a right worldview and a right metaphysic. That is, we must both understand the structures of reality as they are (metaphysics) and adopt a perspective that orients us to live and think in alignment with those structures (worldview). In this essay, I will focus on the former: a Christian metaphysic. In particular, I will explain two aspects of a Christian metaphysic that address the issues of our day: realism and participation.

The Secular Metaphysic: “Reality Is a Social Construct”

Before we dive into the biblical conception of reality, let’s get a better handle on what we’re dealing with today. Whether people articulate it or not, everyone has a metaphysic, or a view of the basic structures of reality. Your male friend who identifies as a furry, a woman, or a manatee does so because of a philosophical system called Nominalism. He probably doesn’t realize this, but at the end of this section, you will. In the secular West, that metaphysic is nominalism. The word “nominalism” comes from the Latin word for “name.” Basically, nominalism holds that what things are is determined by social convention—i.e., by the subjective names we give them. In reality there are no such things as ‘men,’ ‘women,’ ‘cows,’ or ‘bookshelves,’ at least according to this view. ‘Man’ is merely a name we give to a collection of features that we frequently associate together in the objects we call ‘men.’ The same holds true for women, human beings, cats, bookshelves, and anything else you can think of. Nominalism holds that the only things that really exist are particular individuals. Overarching categories—what philosophers call universals (like ‘human beings’ or ‘bookshelves’)—do not exist in and of themselves according to this view. Instead, these categories are just names society has come up with for the convenience of associating similar objects. This means that ‘Bob’ and ‘Steve’ exist as particular individuals, but ‘man’ or ‘human being’ does not. We may call Bob and Steve men and/or human beings, because they appear similar to us, but these are arbitrary categories imposed on them simply for social convenience. For nominalists, there is no really existing thing like human nature or maleness in which Bob and Steve both share—only names.^[2]

2. Of course, nominalists would hold that the names really exist, but only as names (i.e., concepts). They are ‘universal’ only insofar as they are predicable of many things—e.g., the word ‘cat’ is predicable of every cat. But what makes the word cat predicable of every cat? Not a shared feline nature that really exists, merely that the word ‘cat’ describes the phenomena associated with each thing we call a ‘cat.’

The roots of nominalism are as old as philosophy itself.^[3] Nominalism began gaining popularity in the late Middle Ages, most significantly in the work of William of Ockham (1287–1347). Yet it was not until the Enlightenment (late 1600s–early 1800s) that nominalism became the prevailing metaphysic of the Western world. Today, we primarily deal with a nominalist metaphysic filtered through the framework passed down to us by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant wrote near the end of the Enlightenment, and his work cemented its metaphysical conclusions. Kant argued that we do not encounter reality as it is. Instead, our minds construct our perception of reality, such that we only ever have access to our perceptions of reality (phenomena) and never to reality itself (noumena). In other words, Kant introduced the idea that reality as we experience it is constructed by human beings. It’s as if Kant says that every human views the world through a pair of red-tinted goggles that they can never take off. If that’s the case, we’ll never know what the world really looks like (noumena)—we’ll only know what reality-through-red-goggles looks like (phenomena). For Kant, the structure of our minds shapes everything we see, think, and experience. Our minds are the goggles that color everything, preventing us from ever accessing the world as it is. Whether reality as it in itself corresponds with our perception of it is an open question for Kant—but ultimately an irrelevant one, as it is impossible to break through our perceptions of reality to experience reality itself. Thus, Kant eliminated the possibility of us ever knowing universals, since universals belong to the realm of reality itself. If all we have are perceptions of reality (not reality itself), then all that remains is the subjective names we give things. In this view, “reality” as we experience it is nothing but a human construct. In light of this, it should not surprise us that Ketanji Brown Jackson couldn’t define what a woman is—rather, it should surprise us that she can define anything at all!

3. Some of Plato’s contemporaries, particularly Antisthenes (445–365 BC) and Diogenes of Sinope (404–323 BC) are traditionally considered the first nominalists.

After Kant, things somehow got even worse. Kant had at least believed that all human minds were constructed the same, and therefore he believed that they constructed their perceptions of reality in the same way. Even if we couldn’t access reality directly, at least we could agree on what we perceived. Of course, having severed the tie between our perceptions and reality itself, Kant had no way of proving this agreement. The twentieth-century postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault (among others) would seize on Kant’s error. The way our minds organize reality, Foucault argued, is conditioned by language and culture. In light of this, all assertions are claims for gaining power.[4] For Foucault, discussions are not aimed at discovering truth in reality (Kant already closed this possibility to us), nor even about understanding the shared ‘perceived reality’ in which we live. No, conversations are power struggles aimed at determining whose categories get to construct reality. For Foucault, like Kant, we are all wearing goggles. Only this time, some are red-tinted, others are blue-tinted, and still others are green-tinted. When we all look at a cloud, who gets to the final word on what color it actually is: red, blue or green? For Foucault, the idea that reality is a social construct is no longer in dispute, it is taken as an established fact. All that remains is a battle over who will get to construct it.

4. On Foucault’s view, one need not consciously be making a bid for personal power in order for this to be true. Just by virtue of articulating your perspective, you are already making a power claim for your group or worldview. And the worldview for which you are making a power claim can even be a worldview that oppresses you personally. Think of the way that the left typically treats black conservatives. The left tries to silence them, because they believe the speech of these black conservatives is a bid at power for white power structures—that is, power that is oriented towards their own oppression as blacks. So even though they don’t think black conservatives are aiming to gain their own personal power, they still must be silenced as those who reinforce the power of the ‘oppressor class.’ Such behavior is simply Foucault’s metaphysic filtered through Marxism and critical theory.

For Foucault, the names we give things (nominalism) actually structure the way that we and those around us perceive reality. And so, the war (as Nominalists view it) is not over whether male-ness or female-ness exist as real things, nor even about whether we perceive common features in them, but about who gets to define gender and its role in society. Will it be the so-called cisgender conservatives, who aim to impose their structure on everyone else? Or will every individual be able to define their own gender (or age, or species, etc.) based on their lived experience? If Foucault’s metaphysic is assumed and the question is put in these terms, it is not hard to see the appeal of transgender ideology—even for a person who doesn’t feel the slightest hint of gender dysphoria. The same logic extends seamlessly to trans-speciesism, furry identities, and anything else you can think of: if the self is the ultimate arbiter of identity categories, and if these categories are social constructions rather than objective realities, then why should “species” be any more fixed than gender? The appeal of adopting a “fursona” or identifying as non-human (“otherkin,” “therian,” etc.)^[5] becomes comprehensible within this framework. More than that, any speech that questions someone’s self-identification, insists on defining terms, or imposes alternative categories is understood to be a raw exertion of power attempting to suppress the identity of others. It would be like forcing someone with red glasses to see the world as green, by gaslighting them or even gouging out their eyes if they would not surrender their perspective. This is why nominalists often classify conservative speech as “violence:” if speech is a power bid to construct reality and if the reality being constructed is deemed oppressive, then the speech must be silenced—by any means necessary. To put it bluntly, the meme-covered bullets of transgender shooters find their philosophical grandfather in Foucault.

5. For an uncomfortably exhaustive list of such terms, see this thread on therian-guide.com.

This rabbit hole—started by William of Ockham, widened by Kant, and then deepened by Foucault—goes ultimately down to the pit of hell. It deceives people, it disorients them, it inoculates them against truth and logic, and it even opens the door to violence. Just like the serpent, a murderer from the beginning, sought to re-construct reality in his very first question to Eve, so also nominalism twists, distorts, and kills. Nominalism is not a theoretical and dry college-lecture-hall yawner. It’s the philosophical system that makes a furry or a “transgender” person feel like your unwillingness to acknowledge their identity is a fascist power grab. As Christians, we must not only oppose the fruit of the secular, nominalist, social-construct metaphysic, but we must provide an alternative understanding of reality. But can’t we just do this simply with common sense?

Common Sense: An Alternative to Doing Metaphysics?

“We don’t need philosophy or metaphysics. We can just use common sense”—right? “It’s just obvious that men aren’t women and that reality isn’t whatever we make it up to be.” But here’s the uncomfortable truth: common sense, though a wonderful God-given gift, is not sufficient to address the challenges of our day, because nominalism has seeped deep enough into our modern worldview to skew even the foundation of common sense itself. One need look no farther than the contemporary political landscape to recognize that as good as common sense is, it won’t give us a biblical worldview. In recent years, a large swath of American culture has begun realizing that common sense dictates that men are not women and shouldn’t compete in women’s sports. Right-wing common sense likewise recognizes that unborn children are human beings, and wantonly murdering them should be illegal. So far, so good.

But “common sense”—skewed as it is without a biblical metaphysic—also says that homosexual “marriage” is acceptable (because people should be able to love whoever they want), that In Vitro Fertilization is a perfectly legitimate fertility treatment (despite the fact that numerous children are indefinitely frozen or murdered in the process), and that abortion should be permissible in cases of rape (because the mother’s trauma outweighs the baby’s right to life). These contradictions reveal something important: what a society considers to be “common sense” is based on two things: 1) its underlying worldview and metaphysic^[6] and 2) the hard reality of living in the world God created (which continues to press truth upon us, even when our metaphysic denies it).^[7] That is to say that even nominalists live in a world where men playing rugby with women (or volleyball, or boxing, etc.) results in serious injuries. The upshot is that common sense (or intuition) is an unreliable guide: sometimes it will come to right conclusions (e.g., banning men in women’s sports) because it is based on the reality of living in God’s world, other times it will lead us astray (e.g., legitimizing homosexuality) because it is based on our society’s metaphysic. Common sense is not a substitute for metaphysics—common sense flows from metaphysics. We need a biblical metaphysic not only to confront secular ideology, but also to set our common sense intuitions on a sure and stable foundation. Thankfully, the Bible provides just that—especially in its opening pages.

A Christian Metaphysic

“In the beginning, God created . . . ” (Gen. 1:1). The very first thing Scripture tells us is that there is a God who exists.^[8] Indeed, a God who has always existed, for he was there “in the beginning” and it was his action that caused there to be a “beginning” at all. Then, Scripture tells us what this God did “in the beginning”—he “created.” Here in its first five words, Scripture divides all reality into two categories: God, and not-God. One the one side is God, eternal and existing in himself, and on the other side is everything else—created by God, and dependent on him. God and creation are fundamentally distinct. Never will there be any blurring between the two. This is what theologians call the Creator-creature distinction, and it is the foundation of the Bible’s metaphysic.

Metaphysics in Days One through Three: Negating Nominalism

8. For a defense of why we should look to the Bible in the first place, see the section “Why a Revelational Epistemology?” in Pierce Taylor Hibbs, “Can You Understand a Kangaroo Without a Bible? Why I Hold a Revelational Epistemology,” Christ Over All, August 19, 2024.

Much more could be said about the implications of the Creator-creature distinction for understanding the being of God, but here our focus is on the nature of the world that God has made. Genesis 1 describes the way God formed and filled the world he had made (Gen. 1:2ff) by his Word (Gen. 1:3a) and his Spirit (Gen 1:2b).^[9] We are told that everything was “without form” (Gen 1:2) until God gave it form in the first three days of creation. He made light, and separated it from darkness (Gen 1:3–4); He made the sky, and separated waters from waters (Gen 1:6–7); He made dry land, and separated it from the seas (Gen 1:9). We should notice immediately that as God makes these things, he gives them a definite character by defining what they are in contrast to other things. God not only creates light, for example, but separates it from darkness, thereby granting light a fixed reality. In other words, what light is inheres in reality itself, and not human perception.^[10]

Moreover, we should also notice that on these first three days it is God who names each of the things he has made—not human society (Gen. 1:5, 8, 10). The names—i.e., the classification of what these things are)—are therefore not arbitrary, nor is any creature at liberty to change them. I do not of course mean that human beings are prohibited from speaking languages other than the Biblical Hebrew that Genesis was written in, nor am I saying that languages ought not develop complex vocabularies of overlapping concepts. What I do mean is that humans are not at liberty to re-classify the created order in contradiction to God’s design. The one who designed and separated land and sea has defined what they are and revealed that definition to us by naming them. Reality is not a social construct. Moreover, the names God gives are not arbitrary, nor are they based simply on appearances; they correspond with the divine design of the things named. One of the reasons Nominalism is false is because when God names something, he names it according to what he made it to be—that is, he names it according to what it is, not just what it seems like. He calls the dry ground “land” because that is what it is, according to his design.

There is one Being in the universe who sees and perceives all things as they really are without any tinted goggles, because there is one Being who made all things as they really are. We can trust his description of the clouds, and the trees, and male and female, and everything else. And amazingly, as we grow in seeing reality the way he sees it, our goggles start to lose their tint, until one day, they’ll be clear as glass.^[11]

11. Our goggles never “fall off” because we are creatures. As finite beings, our perception of reality is conditioned by our minds (Kant was right about that). But Kant was wrong in that he did not believe in a God who made our minds to rightly perceive reality, nor in a God who reveals himself (and the world he has made) to us authoritatively and objectively in his word.

Metaphysics in Days Four through Six: Rooting Realism

The metaphysic proffered by Genesis 1 becomes even clearer when we consider the “filling” work of God. While on the first three days God formed that which was without form, now on these next three he fills that which was empty. After creating the stars, Sun, and moon in the heavens (Gen. 1:14–18), God proceeds to fill the sea, sky, and land with all sorts of creatures (Gen. 1:20–25). In each of these instances, we read that God created these creatures “according to their kinds.” In fact, in this chapter we are told ten times that God created the things of this world “according to its/their kind” (Gen. 1:11, 12 [2x], 21 [2x], 24 [2x], 25 [3x]). What is being communicated here? At the most basic level, Moses is telling us that God has built order into the structure of creation. There are not only a multitude of individual sea creatures, there are also kinds of sea creatures. We therefore infer that when God created individual things (e.g., individual whales and manatees) he also created kinds of things. If no such thing as a “kind” really exists, then it is impossible for God to create things “according to their kinds.” But what is a “kind”? Minimally, a “kind” must refer to the design or blueprint for what a thing is that exists in the mind of God. That is, God must have a concept of whale nature (or whale-ness) in order for him to create individual whales according to the pattern of being whales. Being-a-whale must be a meaningful metaphysical category in the mind of God for the biblical testimony that God created all things “according to their kinds” to make any sense. Furthermore, this “kind” exists not only in the mind of God as a blueprint, but it also exists in each particular thing: every manatee possesses a manatee nature, corresponding to the idea of manatee nature itself that exists in the mind of God. And here we’ve come full circle. If each particular is created “according to” the universal, then two things must be true: 1) that universal really exists in the mind of God, and 2) each particular belonging to that universal really corresponds to it.

To some, this discussion may feel overly tedious. But two things should keep us from rolling our eyes back into our head. First, let’s remember that in just fourteen verses Moses repeats a variation of this phrase “according to their kinds” ten times. Whatever is being communicated here must be very significant to demand so much repetition. Second, let’s remember the present world in which we live. It is rapidly becoming normal for young adults to believe themselves to be members of a different species! While they likely won’t articulate the argument in such terms, ‘furries’ are people who believe that both human nature and cat-ness or dog-ness are socially constructed categories, empty of real metaphysical content, and that they can therefore take on a feline or canine nature simply by altering their behavior and appearance. Ridiculous as this notion is, our solution cannot simply be mockery. Mockery exposes as ridiculous those things that are clearly opposed to common sense intuition. But as we saw earlier, without a biblical metaphysic, our common sense intuitions will start to slide towards the culture into which we are socialized. Our teenagers live in a world where their friends, classmates, schoolteachers, and co-workers nearly all intuitively believe in a metaphysic that justifies transgenderism, trans-speciesism, and any kind of distortion of God’s design you can think of. If they are going to resist the pull of the worldview they’re being socialized into, then they need grounding in a biblical metaphysic, and not merely common sense.^[12] So as we disciple them, it is worth our time and a little brain-burn to dig deep into understanding the metaphysical categories laid out in Genesis 1. Our churches and our world need it more than ever.

12. Even more importantly, they need grounding in a church community (ideally with meaningful membership) so that their social commonsense intuitions are shaped in a biblical direction. But this article simply focuses on the aspect of metaphysics.

Bringing it All Together

Scripture is a deep well, with a rich vision of created reality. Had we the time, we could plumb further into the metaphysics of Genesis 1. But what initial conclusions can we draw from our foray into this chapter regarding a properly Christian view of reality?^[13]

• First, reality is given to us. It is not socially constructed; it is created.
• Second, all created things have natures designed by God.^[14]
• Third, these natures really exist, are defined in the mind of God, and encompass his design for what things are and what they are for.^[15]

Taken together, these three conclusions mean that what is ultimately real is not, and cannot be, merely defined by appearances. A woman is not whatever seems like a woman; a woman is a creature designed by God to be a woman who has a female human nature that corresponds to the female human nature itself, as designed in the mind of God. Christians ought to be aware that much of our culture claims that reality itself will be redefined if only our words and social categories are redefined, since our words and social categories construct reality. But Genesis 1 teaches something different: God has made reality, and what he has made is not Play-Doh, but is real in the fullest possible sense. And this is not something to grieve over; it is good news! For the reality that God has made is very good (Gen. 1:31).

Consider the contrast: the nominalist offers us endless quests to determine our own identity in the sea of ever-changing social structures—exhausting ourselves in power struggles and shifting cultural moods, grasping for solid ground that never comes. But we are made by God as something, and what we are will not change. And we are made by God for something, a North Star that is fixed in the sky. Far from being restrictive, God’s design gives us the stability and purpose our souls crave.

Each generation we raise up will enter a world defined by nominalism, with no fixed anchors, only power struggles and changing cultural moods. But we will not send them out unequipped. We will root them, and ourselves, in the Word of God which stands forever—unmoved by cultural storms and unshaken by the chaos of our age—and in its vision of reality.