Book Review
Humanity's Nature
Nature's End: The Theological Meaning of the New Genetics
by Richard Sherlock
ISI Books, Religion and Contemporary Culture Series, 2010
(230 pages, $25.00, paperback)
reviewed by J. Daryl Charles
Nature's End joins a growing list of cultural commentaries on the "age of technology" and the challenges it poses to our understanding of being human. Many of these, in one form or fashion, owe a conspicuous debt to the pioneering work of people like Hans Jonas (The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age; Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz; and Technik, Medizin und Ethik ["On Technology, Medicine and Ethics"]), Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society and The Technological Bluff), and Neil Postman (Technopoly), as well as to C. S. Lewis's classic The Abolition of Man. Closer to our time, the encyclical work of John Paul II, particularly that which appeared in the 1990s, must also be deemed enormously significant for its theological discernment and incisive social criticism.
The author of this volume, a professor of philosophy at Utah State University and co-editor of the medical textbook Ethical Issues in Biotechnology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), writes under the conviction that modern science aims to "dominate nature" rather than to "know nature as a good in itself" (xi). This power to dominate, he believes, challenges us to re-think the purpose of technology inasmuch as we increasingly hear of "redesigning human beings" and "remaking Eden." The power of technology, accordingly, "has now turned on human life itself," even to the extent that "death itself no longer seems so inevitable" (xiii).
For us, then, in the early twenty-first century, the fundamental questions regarding transformative technologies that enhance, redesign, and prolong life may thus be identified: "What is the ultimate purpose of human existence?" And can we express this purpose "in terms that permit us to judge individual human beings, and supposed improvements, as better or worse?" (xiv). Neither biology nor philosophy, Richard Sherlock insists, is equipped to answer the ultimate questions concerning human significance. Rather, theology—and theology alone—must provide the rationale.
Aristotle's Shortcoming
The argument set forth in Nature's End is straightforward and tripartite:
it is moral-philosophical (chapters one and two), technological (chapters three and four), and theological (chapters five and six). The volume's first two chapters are devoted to an understanding of ethics, human flourishing, and the moral impulse—an impulse that points beyond biology for ultimate meaning, even when it does not deny the biological aspect of our humanness.
Sherlock introduces his discussion of human flourishing with an Aristotelian account of the moral impulse as mirrored in Nicomachean Ethics, noting several baseline assumptions of "the philosopher": moral competence accrues through life experience, a competence owing to orthos logos, right reason; the moral life finds its completion in a political community, since we are born into social communities; and, because all action is teleological, the state of happiness must be the goal of all human endeavor. Thus, for Aristotle, the moral life is a life of virtues that become habituated over time.
But Sherlock observes a shortcoming in Aristotle, for given the absence of a permanent cosmic teleology, the lack of a "grand end," Aristotle must root human nature in biology. To which Sherlock responds that a richer, more theological vision is necessary.
Thereupon Sherlock helpfully assesses current thinking about the moral impulse, noting the influence of Hume and Darwin and briefly critiquing contemporary writers such as the late James Q. Wilson, Larry Arnhart, and Robert J. McShea. In this light, he warns that we cannot assume, based on biology, a fixity of human nature, especially given the rapid advances in biotechnology and genetics. After all, what is "normal" or "standard" in an era when neuroscience, psycho-socio-pharmacology, and genetic technologies can alter our perceived "nature"?
J. Daryl Charles is the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including Retrieving the Natural Law (2008), Natural Law and Religious Freedom (2018), and, most recently, Just War and Christian Traditions (forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God's Gifts for a Fallen World, Volume 3 (2020). He is a contributing editor to Touchstone.
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