Humans Playing God? Genetic engineering and the created
co-creator
By Paul Fayter
The term “playing God” - rooted in a long tradition of
Promethean, Faustian and Frankensteinian stories - is commonly used to express
fears that we are going “too far” in our scientific and technological
activities. This metaphor has been used in recent popular and scholarly debates
about genetic engineering and, especially, human cloning. I’d like to ask: does
this religious-sounding term make sense? And, is there a theologically less
problematic description of the human scientific project?
Frederick
Ferré tells the story of his father who, in 1922, as a boy in rural Minnesota
community of Swedish immigrants, heard a Baptist preacher rail against his
parishioners’ use of lightning rods (“shiny spikes of faithlessness.”)
“Thunderbolts were God’s to hurl, not man’s to deflect,” Ferré summarizes the sermon. “The
fires of hell … were even then being stoked for those who insisted on rising in
rebellion against God’s will by installing newfangled lightning rods.” But, Ferré
reflects, “could God’s will truly be foiled by the steel rod and a grounding
wire? Was it really wrong to protect family and livestock from the storms that
swept in from the prairies with such seemingly indiscriminate force?” Is it
believable that the God we know in Jesus Christ “would punish farmers for
taking whatever meager technological precautions might be available” against
natural disasters?[1]
Popular
memory recalls biblical stories of punishment meted out for human disobedience
and pride (e.g., Gen 3 and 11.) But a careful reading of the Eden and Tower of
Babel episodes would show that they express ancient anxieties that human
initiatives would be foiled by a deity who jealously guards divine prerogatives.
My claim - there is insufficient space to offer a full argument here - is that
the idea of “playing God” is, from a Christian perspective, theologically
dubious because it implies that the Creator of the universe is some insecure,
lesser god that can be diminished by human achievement, a being that we are
capable of imitating, who if offended by scientific enquiry.
Ted
Peters, in Playing God? Genetic
Determinism and Human Freedom[2]
unpacks three meanings of the term “playing God” in the context of the revolutionary
developments in genetics that allow us to probe and manipulate the molecular
structures of our biological nature. The first sense has to do with “learning
God’s awesome secrets,” and “standing on the threshold of acquiring ‘Godlike’
powers.” The second refers to the “actual wielding of power over life and
death.” And the third - his focus in the book - involves the use of science to
displace God’s role in a project to “alter life and influence human evolution.”
As
an historian of science, technology and science fiction, I see common
invocations by opponents of genetic engineering and biotechnology of “playing
God”, Brave New World, Frankenstein or
Dr. Moreau as a rhetorical move that
shuts off, rather than advances, critical examination of the issues. The idea
behind the term is centuries old and refers to trespassing on morally forbidden
territory, exceeding out “natural” limitations, or presuming to have power over
life and death. The quest for knowledge and power suggested by the term “playing
God” is seen as sacrilegious - as if we could
usurp God’s dominion and authority.
But
we’ve always been able to procreate and kill, to heal and neglect. Whether we
like it or not, we do have the power of life and death over others. We have
(within the limits of our changing technical abilities) genetically manipulated
other species, and intervened in our own evolution for millenia. When we accept
responsibility for moral decision-making and action in the world, we are not
“playing God.” We are “playing at” being our evolving selves, we are becoming human. We are working within nature (which we understand as
“creation, the theatre of God’s glory and active presence.) One could argue
that we would abdicating our
creaturely responsibility as stewards of God’s grace and as moral and
intelligent agents - however marred by greed, selfishness, violence, and other
powers of sin and death - were we passively to leave the care, protection and
direction of life and health to “nature” or “acts of God.”
Warnings
not to “play God” can have great social and ethical value if they lead us to
caution, and to sustained and disciplined consideration of the meaning and
implications of our actions. It is sheer arrogance to imagine we have the
wisdom and knowledge to manipulate organisms and manage evolution without ill
effects. Just because we can do
something does not, of course, mean we need or ought to.
But
the “playing God” card can be little more than an irrational cliché,
signaling moral and intellectual cowardice, a reluctance to confront risk and
accept responsibility. It can be a cheap way to scold scientists for real and
imagined transgressions. By definition - as finite creature - we cannot compete
with or play at being the Holy One who can create ex nihilo and who sustains the very existence of all creatures in
the world (creatio continua.) Our
freedom and power to act at our creaturely level cannot threaten the
sovereignty of God. Still, one can argue that we humans have been not only
created but commissioned to work faithfully and creatively in the world in
light of the vision of a redeemed future, the “new creation” that we glimpse in
Romans and Revelation.
Fundamental
to our efforts to discern how to act ethically and Christianly in the face of
the new genetics is the question of theological anthropology. How do we
understand our own humanity? (This alone will not disclose how we should conduct and apply genetic research. We also need a
theology of creation, of covenant, of theodicy and redemption.) A fruitful theological
concept of humanhood that has been receiving great attention in the
constructive science-and-religion dialogue over the past twenty years is that
of “created co-creator”, especially as defined and developed by Philip Hefner,
for example, in his The Human Factor:
Evolution, Culture and Religion.[3]
The
Bible teaches that we are made in the image of a Creator God; thus we creatures are also creative. Our creativity has been expressed in music, art and
literature, in technology, physics and genetics. We can create new ideas, new
materials, new organisms. As “created” we are entirely dependent upon God for
our existence, having emerged from a cosmos created ex nihilo. Our proper stance is one of humility, gratitude and
reverent awe before the Creator. We can never equal or rival God, but we do
exist in deep relationship with God. As “co-creators” we reflect the imago Dei; we are bearers of the
Creator’s image and our true humanum is
found in Christ. As part of the created order - from within nature, as part of
an evolving universe become aware of itself - we have through technology and
science the power and the freedom to shape nature toward the divine telos. (Here I am clearly suggesting a
link with Teilhard de Chardin and other process theologians.)
Ronale
Cole-Turner in his book The New Genesis:
Theology and the Genetic Revolution[4]
offers a critical revision of Hefner’s concept of the created co-creator. He
proposes that we humans have a vocation from God to participate in the creative
and redemptive (I would add eschatological) transformation of nature. The
genetic engineering of organisms, including cloning, could then be seen not as
a hubris-laden example of “playing God” but as a “natural” extension, via human
activity, of divine creativity. I am not as deferential towards science nor as
sanguine about human goodness as Cole-Turner seems to be. However, I appreciate
his desire to neither demonize nor deify technology and his theology of God as
more than a superbeing threatened by our apparently Promethean intentions.
Dare
we dream - fully aware of the dangers - of a “redeemed science” that is both
godly and truly human? Can genetics serve the aims of the Kingdom of God, aims
such as justice, healing, compassion, abundant life and joy? I want to be open
to that possibility, while maintaining a degree of scepticism and suspicion. (I
regard human reproductive cloning as theologically and ethically unacceptable
at present, for instance.) Work by Hefner and others on the idea of humans as created co-creators deservedly continues
to be read, used, contested and developed.
In New Genesis, Cole-Turner argues that
Christianity must both “absorb” new scientific insights and remember its own
core doctrines of “creation and redemption, sin and grace, incarnation and
transfiguration.” According to the Book of Genesis, creation was made and
blessed by God; it is both good, yet disordered by sin. “If such a moral
disorder exists in nature,” writes Cole-Turner, “and if God is understood to be
at work creatively and redemptively resolving that disorder, and if we
recognize ourselves as invited by God to participate in that creative and
redemptive work, then we can see our technology, especially our genetic
engineering, as a partnership with God in the expanding and redeeming of
nature.”[5]
Amen?
[1] Frederick
Ferré, Hellfire and Lightning Rods: Liberating Science, Technology and
Religion (Orbis, 1993) p.27.
[2] Routledge,
1997, chapter 1
[3]
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1993) especially pp. 35-42.
[4]
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993, especially pp. 98-109.
[5] Cole-Turner,
New Genesis, p.11.
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