Part 1
A few words, then, on dangerous thinking.

If we are to avoid deadly or dehumanizing results from our uses of biotechnology, everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political rule. But here, I regret to say, the news so far is not encouraging. For the relevant intellectual, spiritual, and moral resources of our society, the legacy of civilizing traditions painfully acquired and long-preserved, are taking a beating—not least because they are being called into question by the findings of modern science itself. The technologies present troublesome ethical dilemmas, but the underlying scientific notions call into question the very foundations of our ethics.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the challenge came in the form of Darwinism and its seeming opposition to biblical religion, a battle initiated not so much by the scientists as by the beleaguered defenders of orthodoxy. In our own time, the challenge comes from molecular biology, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology, fueled by their practitioners’ overconfident belief in the sufficiency of their reductionist explanations of all vital and human phenomena. Never mind “created in the image of God”: what elevated humanistic view of human life or human goodness is defensible against the belief, trumpeted by biology’s most public and prophetic voices, that man is just a collection of molecules, an accident on the stage of evolution, a freakish speck of mind in a mindless universe, fundamentally no different from other living—or even nonliving—things? What chance have our treasured ideas of freedom and dignity against the reductive notion of “the selfish gene” (or, for that matter, of “genes for altruism”), the belief that DNA is the essence of life, or the teaching that all human behavior and our rich inner life are rendered intelligible only in terms of their contributions to species survival and reproductive success?

These transformations of moral outlook are, in fact, welcomed by many of our leading scientists and intellectuals. In 1997, the luminaries of the International Academy of Humanism—including biologists Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson and humanists Isaiah Berlin, W. V. Quine, and Kurt Vonnegut—issued a statement in defense of cloning research in higher mammals and human beings. Their reasons were revealing:

The problem lies less with the scientific findings themselves, more with the shallow philosophy that recognizes no other truths but these and with the arrogant pronouncements of the bioprophets. Here, for example is the eminent psychologist Stephen Pinker railing against any appeal to the human soul:



There is, of course, nothing novel about reductionism and materialism of the kind displayed here; these are doctrines with which Socrates contended long ago. What is new is that, as philosophies, they seem (to many people) to be vindicated by scientific advance. Here, in consequence, is perhaps the most pernicious result of our technological progress—more dehumanizing than any actual manipulation or technique, present or future: the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization.

Hence, our peculiar moral crisis. We are in turbulent seas without a landmark precisely because we adhere more and more to a view of human life that both gives us enormous power and that, at the same time, denies every possibility of non-arbitrary standards for guiding its use. Though well equipped, we know not who we are or where we are going. We triumph over nature’s unpredictabilities only to subject ourselves, tragically, to the still greater unpredictability of our capricious wills and our fickle opinions. Engineering the engineer as well as the engine, we race our train we know not where. Lacking any rich view of human flourishing, out pursuit of a more perfect human is at best chimerical. That we do not recognize our predicament is itself a tribute to the depth of our infatuation with scientific progress and our naive faith in the sufficiency of our humanitarian impulses.

Let me return in conclusion to look again at the glass man, seen now in the light of this discussion. It turns out that the glass man is in fact not transparent but opaque. It pretends to show us the innermost man, but it in truth renders his humanity permanently absent. Yes, we see the liver, the kidneys, and the colon, but we learn nothing about the soul. The mysterious character of the human person has not been explained; rather it has been ignored, nay banished. The problem is not that anatomizing did not reveal the soul—no one thought it could. It is rather that anatomizing denies the soul, denies the wholeness and the inner depth of the human being, even in the very act that seems for the first time to make it visible to him.

In one respect, however, the glass man reveals a permanent truth about the human being, ironically driving home a lesson that I do not believe that its makers meant to teach. When we look at the glass man’s head and face, hoping to find evidence of the human soul within, what stares back at us is only the bony skull, universally the mark and symbol of death. Lurking beneath the outer surface of this god-like man is the truth about his vaunted perfection: alas, poor Yorick, death will be his fate, medicine or no medicine. And surely speaking better than his creators intended, the glass man’s skull that betokens death for the individual human being betokens also the deadly consequence for a society that would pursue bodily perfection in ways that do not also join hands in solidarity with those who will never reach it.

The idealistic German scientists could not have known that the glass man was the harbinger of anything like the final solution. But they should have known that the biologizing and soulless account of human life that they were trumpeting is in fact always deadly to humanity—even if not one crematorium is built. A dehumanizing account of human life can all by itself produce a holocaust of the human spirit.

Our value neutral and materialist science can be of tremendous help in ameliorating disease and relieving bodily suffering. But it cannot even come within hailing distance of human perfection, let alone salvation. In seeking his salvation, if salvation is to be sought, man must continue to look beyond himself, while humbly using his limited powers and still more limited wisdom to try to make our world a little bit better rather than a little bit worse. In the end, the good that we will do with science and medicine can only be completed by avoiding those evils that come from seeing health as salvation, the soul as biochemicals, and medicine as the messiah.

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