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Rival immortalities.

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Rival Immortalities

HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE BIOTECH CENTURY: A CHRISTIAN VISION FOR PUBLIC POLICY. Edited by CHARLES W. COLSON and NIGEL M. DE S. CAMERON Inter Varsity. 252pp. $15 paper.

In Human Dignity in the Biotech Century: A Christian Vision for Public Policy, some of the most active voices in the American bioethics debate reflect on the promise and perils of biotechnology, but especially the perils. This collection surveys a wide range of novel biological experiments: the creation and destruction of human embryos to procure stem cells, the creation of cloned human children, the genetic engineering of offspring, the merging of human beings with machines. These advances, say the authors, all force us to reflect again on what it means to be human-and especially on what it means to have "dominion" over God's creation and to be creatures "made in God's image."

What binds these errant technologies together is human willfulness gone mad. In trying to extend life using stem cells from embryos, we destroy the weakest and most vulnerable human beings. In trying to improve the genetic quality of our children, we abort the disabled as "life unworthy of life." In trying to preserve our conscious minds forever, we reduce human beings to "software" and "hardware" that can be mixed, matched, downloaded, and upgraded. "With the latest advances in biotechnology," writes coeditor Charles Colson, "not only are we taking upon ourselves the god-like prerogative of ending human life as we choose ... but we are attempting to appropriate the god-like prerogative of making human life as we choose."

While some scientists may see themselves as persecuted Galileos and some religious believers may worry about "man playing God," the bioethics debate is not best seen as a clash between religion and science. Most orthodox Christians are friends of biomedical research; they see biotechnology as a moral enterprise so long as it observes moral limits. And many scientists have made biotechnology a religion, seeing stem-cell research as a form of salvation for those burdened by nature's imperfections, and envisioning...

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