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It's sounds compatible to me. That's really the way I understand what Abdul-baha is saying—that a human is not merely the sum total of its physical parts. In fact, in Foundations of World Unity, he says that man has a threefold nature: animal, human and divine. And that the human bit stands at the confluence (my terminology, not his) of the animal and the divine.

The scriptures all state that God has created us in His/Her image. "Atman," says Krishna, "is the spirit of God in man."

I have begun to understand our evolution on the spiritual level—on the social level and the intellectual level—as becoming truly human. We are in a stage in many parts of the world where we are caught in the half-light (Abdu'l-Baha's term) between animal darkness and divine illumination. Some of us are striving toward that human state (which is the purpose of the revealed religions, according to Baha'u'llah) and others are content with or even eagerly embracing a return to more animal behavior, I think, without much thought to the longterm consequences of our actions. We have learned to take mass killings, rapine, and the rampant spread of preventable diseases in stride. These are small prices to pay for the liberty that animals possess and some humans envy.

There is a school of thought that leans heavily on the idea that man is a mere animal with enhanced abilities. A cheetah's ability to run fast, or a bird's ability to fly is no different, qualitatively, from a human being's ability to do both those things without having evolved the physical qualities that would make them possible. Our ability to reason and invent our way from "I wish I could fly like a bird" to "I'm flying to England next week" and the myriad unique human attributes and processes that went from whimsy to reality is overlooked completely.

Birds have been flying pretty much the same way for millions of years without significant change. The same cannot be said of human beings. That, to me, is evidence enough of the atman, the buddhi, the rational soul and by inference, the God of whom it is a reflection.