Some guests feel less like “interviews” and more like stepping into a long, ongoing conversation about what it means to be human. Mark Vernon is one of those. A former Church of England priest, now a psychotherapist, writer, and careful reader of Plato, Dante, and the Bible, he joined me on Created in the Image of God to talk about “the invitation of uncertainty.”
We covered a lot of ground—from Genesis to big data to zombies—so for this week’s Substack, I want to distill five things I took away from our time together.
1. Consciousness Evolves: From Tribal Mind to “I Am”
Mark doesn’t treat Plato, Dante, or Genesis as isolated artifacts. He sees them as waypoints in the evolution of human consciousness.
For much of human history, identity was experienced as fundamentally collective: you were your tribe, your city, your lineage. Your “self” lived in your people and place more than in an inner psychological space. Mark pointed to the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Mediterranean world as examples: God is often “our” God versus “their” God, and personhood is tightly bound up with family and nation.
Over centuries, something shifts. Through the prophets, through Plato, and finally through Christ, a new kind of interiority emerges. People begin to experience themselves as distinct “I”s who can also encounter one God as a personal “Thou.”
Christ, as Mark put it, crystallizes this transition: the one who can say “I am” as both human and divine. The uniqueness of that claim only makes sense against a backdrop where a deeper individual self has been slowly coming into focus.
The modern “self,” then, isn’t just a late‑capitalist glitch. It’s the product of a long spiritual unfolding. The open question is what we do with that “I”: lock it in a private room, or let it become a window into the divine.
2. Reading Genesis with New Eyes: Two Creation Stories, Two Ways of Knowing
Mark and I spent time on something many never notice: there are two creation accounts in Genesis, sitting back‑to‑back.
In Genesis 1, we get the cosmic, liturgical vision: God speaks and orders chaos, separates light from darkness, sea from land, sun from moon. It’s majestic, almost architectural. God hovers above the primordial waters and brings form out of formlessness.
In Genesis 2, the tone changes completely. God kneels in the dirt, shapes Adam from dust with divine “hands,” and breathes life into his nostrils. The Creator walks in the garden, speaks directly to the human pair, and even fashions Eve from Adam’s side. It’s intimate, tactile, almost shockingly close.
Traditional scholarship sees these as two different strands, edited together later. Mark’s point is that they also reflect two modes of spiritual perception:
- A more “outside in” awareness in which God is the high organizer of the cosmos.
- A more “inside out” awareness in which God meets the individual person face‑to‑face.
We don’t have to flatten one into the other to keep our theology tidy. Letting both stand can show us how the perception of God and self has been changing all along—and may need to change again in us.
3. Monsters as Mirrors: Frankenstein, Vampires, Zombies, and the Soul
Near the end of the episode, we shifted gears to talk about monsters—Frankenstein, vampires, zombies (and, yes, the Borg). It wasn’t just for fun. Mark used them as a kind of psychological and spiritual mirror.
A few highlights:
- Frankenstein channels our fear of technology unmoored from wisdom—creations that outstrip their creators, machines without soul.
- Vampires picture parasitic ways of living or leading: feeding on others’ energy, unable to see yourself clearly (“no reflection”), charming but ultimately draining.
- Zombies are the modern monster of choice: you get “bitten,” your mind is eaten, and now you wander around infecting others in the same mindless pursuit. It’s a dark parody of St. Paul’s line, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” Possession without love.
Drawing on Dante, Mark reminded us: in classic Christian thought, evil is never a true equal and opposite force. It’s always a perversion of something good—a distortion of a real longing:
- The desire to transcend our limits (warped into transhumanism as escape).
- The longing to be filled with a higher life (warped into possession).
- The need for connection and unity (warped into the Borg’s enforced collective).
Monsters show us what happens when a legitimate desire is severed from wisdom, humility, and love.
It’s worth asking: Which monster do I gravitate toward? The technocrat Frankenstein, the charming vampire, the zombie who lets someone else eat his brain and call it “truth”? Each one points back to a distorted spiritual hunger.
4. When Algorithms Replace Attention: Big Data vs. Participatory Truth
I pressed Mark about COVID, big data, and what happens when lived experience gets dismissed in favor of “the model” or “the narrative.” His answer went deeper than policy critique. He traced it back to a shift in how we define truth itself.
For most of history, truth was seen as participatory. In the Aristotelian and classical Christian view, to know something truly was to enter into its form, harmonize with its inner life, and be changed by the encounter. Intellect wasn’t just abstraction; it was a way of sharing in what you contemplate.
Over the last few centuries, especially since Francis Bacon, that changed. Truth became what you can measure from the outside. The ideal knower is detached, observing without being involved. Facts are what survive that stripping‑down process.
Enter the age of algorithms. If truth is what’s measurable, then dashboards outrank diaries; statistical clusters outrank stories; models outrank the testimony of patients, nurses, or ordinary people. Systems designed to serve persons end up treating persons as noise in the system.
Mark wasn’t advocating we throw out science or data. He was pointing to an imbalance. When “objective process” is treated as the only trustworthy thing, the subjective and interior gets flattened—and that’s dangerous when human beings are nothing if not interior.
We need both:
- Data, to correct our biases and broaden our view.
- Attention to persons, to honor the depths data can never fully capture.
A healthy spiritual imagination will treat algorithms as tools, not as gods.
5. Scarcity or Overflow? Recovering a Trustworthy Reality
Mark ended on what felt like a pastoral note. We live now, he said, inside a meta‑story of scarcity: not enough resources, not enough time, not enough stability before the next collapse. The internet amplifies that sense daily.
But the deepest Christian, Platonic, and mystical traditions insist the opposite: reality is structured by abundance.
In that view:
- God is not a depleted being jealously guarding the last scraps of divinity, but a ceaseless source pouring life into creation.
- Imagination isn’t just private fantasy; it’s the very medium in which we perceive and respond to that generosity.
- Even our high‑tech dreams of “transhumanism” are, at root, a distorted response to vulnerability. Dante’s phrase for true transformation—transhumanize—means awakening to the divine presence already within and around us, not bolting on new hardware.
Does any of this deny the crises we face? No. Systems do break down. Empires rise and fall. Institutions betray their own ideals.
The claim is that under and through all of that, the Source remains prodigal.
If scarcity is ultimate, then hoarding and despair make sense. If abundance is ultimate, we can risk giving—time, attention, creativity, forgiveness—even when our own lives feel precarious.
A Question and a Small Experiment
Two questions linger for me after talking with Mark:
- What if the uncertainty of our age is not proof that reality has become untrustworthy, but an invitation to recover how we know and what we trust?
- What changes in my own life if I start from abundance instead of scarcity—even in small, daily choices?
This week’s experiment:
Notice one place where you’ve been treating yourself or others as data points—something to manage or optimize—and instead, slow down enough to actually participate: listen, feel, attend. And notice one fear‑driven impulse to hoard (time, money, attention), then intentionally give a bit more than feels safe.
See what that does to your sense of reality: does it feel more chaotic, or somehow more coherent?
Next Sunday on Created in the Image of God
Next Sunday’s episode will be a change of tone but very much in the same spirit of honest, thoughtful faith. I’ll be joined by Sy Hoekstra—writer, editor, podcaster, and former lawyer—whose work weaves together disability, humor, and hope. We’ll be talking about how humor can be an expression of faith rather than an escape from suffering.
I hope you’ll tune in.
