In God's Garden (1999)

Creation and Cloning Thought The possibility of cloning human beings challenges Western about creation and our relationship to God. If we understand as the Creator and creation as a completed act, cloning will be a transgression. If, however, we understand as the Power of Creation and creation as a transformative process, we may find a role for human participation, sharing that power as beings created in the image of God. Some scientific revolutions change what people believe about the world. The Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, while not significantly changing what people could then use science to achieve, forced people to re-examine their understanding of the universe, of humanity and its place in the universe, and of God's agency within the universe. Other scientific revolutions, like Faraday and Maxwell's work on the physics of electric fields, pose little challenge to fundamental but dramatically change society through their technological application. We are now in the midst of a genetic revolution that may both profoundly influence our and dramatically change how society functions. Will designing our offspring someday be as easy and common as cut and paste on a word processor? Are we on the cusp of an evolutionary advance toward being an autocreative species, or in attempting to God has our hubris reached its zenith? Such are the questions we face. My purpose here is to explore how the genetic revolution could affect our beliefs. My strategy is to examine several challenges that human cloning and, to a lesser extent, genetic engineering raise for certain basic beliefs--though by no means exclusively beliefs--about humans and God, using as a lens for my thoughts the Biblical account of creation presented in the first few chapters of Genesis.[1] Not only are many basic about humans and embedded in that account, but even if one believes that Genesis is inaccurate as a literal account of the world's creation, or even if one does not believe in God, Genesis provides an excellent framework for addressing some of the existential challenges posed by the genetic revolution. Although I address challenges human cloning presents for certain basic beliefs, such Biblically rooted influence much Christian and Western thought. Moreover, such play an important part in developing public policy toward human cloning. For example, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission devoted roughly one quarter of its report on human cloning to religious views, focusing in particular on the Biblical account of creation. The Biblical account is open to two different interpretations, of creation as a completed act and creation as a transformative process, which carry quite different implications for human cloning. Understanding creation in these different ways suggests different answers to how human cloning might impinge on our beliefes about the worth of a human life, about God's role as Creator and Sovereign, and about how meaning can be found in a human life. I want to suggest that if its implications are properly understood, human cloning can be integrated with many of our basic and can encourage us to view God's act of creation as a transformative process. This is not to advocate that human cloning be permitted--that is a very different question. However, the possibility of human cloning challenges our irrespective of whether we ultimately permit or ban such practice, or of whether human cloning actually occurs. A note before I begin. Although for simplicity I use terms such as Jewish beliefs and Jewish I do not mean to suggest that all Jews do hold or should hold similar about these topics or that Judaism requires one to hold a particular view about these topics. Indeed, I pretend no special expertise in thought, but speak as a lay Jew who seeks to make some existential sense out of the possibility of human cloning. …