Remaking Humanity
A Conference on Biotech Challenges for the Church
by John Schroedel
Philo, the first-century Jewish writer, wrote, “If passions are suffered to go unbridled,” cross-bred creatures “hitherto unknown and with no existence outside mythology will come into being.” He was referring to bestiality. He had no idea that such things would ever come to pass in a lab.
Across the world over the past few years, human genes have been inserted into mice, cow’s eggs, and frog’s eggs. One of these fabrications, the “Onco-Mouse,” has been patented in the United States and is being marketed as a tool for cancer research.1 Likewise, efforts are underway to produce human proteins and organs suitable for transplantation in nonhuman hosts.
Rapid developments in nanotechnology and neurotechnology (cybernetics, wearable computing, functional brain imaging, and neurochips) are also opening tremendous possibilities for enhancing human function. The US government has funded a major project, “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance,” that examines the way advances in these fields may affect human performance, education, and health care over the next ten or twenty years, and the military believes that these technologies will play a significant role in national security.2 Businesses are interested in increasing the productivity of their workforce, while “Transhumanists”—sometimes called “Posthumanists”—advocate enhancement for philosophical reasons, embracing biotechnologies in an effort to engineer the next phase of human evolution.3
With so much to be gained, powerful market forces are at work, and we are being propelled into one of the greatest revolutions in world history.
What Is Man?
This past July 17–19, a few hundred Evangelicals, a handful of Catholics, and an Orthodox Christian met on the campus of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, to wrestle through the implications of recent developments in human biotechnology. “Remaking Humanity” was the tenth annual conference sponsored by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, but the first devoted entirely to biotechnology.4 The co-sponsors included the Christian Medical and Dental Association, Christian Legal Society, Nurses Christian Fellowship, Trinity International University, Americans United for Life, and the Fellowship of Christian Physician Assistants.
A sense of urgency infused the proceedings. As Erwin Lutzer, senior pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago, said in his opening plenary session, “We are at a critical juncture—the future of the human being is at stake.”
Christopher Hook, director of ethics education for the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, articulated the basic agenda of the conference. “We are moving into areas in which technology will enable us to reconfigure the human being,” he said, “but in the history of Christian theology there has never been a true theology of technology or biotechnology which could offer us the tools to address these challenges.”
John Kilner, the president of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, emphasized that such a theology must begin with the question of what it means to be human, and must be grounded in a theological understanding of human dignity. It must also be holistic, rejecting the mind/machine dualism of Enlightenment thought in favor of a more integrated view of the human person, which applies human dignity to the whole of embodied life.
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