Feeding The Fish

This GOVERMENT WANTS TO CREATE MONSTERS AND POSSIBLY EAT YOUR CHILDREN Bill really is causing a ruckus isn’t it? As usual, the church hasn’t bothered to check the facts (or is better advantaged by actively misleading people), the constant use of dishonest and emotive language is sadly predicable. Calling the procedure ‘monstrous’, comparing it to creating Frankenstein’s monster and claiming that if this bill passes “extension of abortion laws, legalised raiding of a dead person’s tissue, legalised creation of babies whose sole purpose is to provide spare parts” will shortly follow should be called mindless fear-mongering. The fact for some reason the opinions of people who use texts written by people who thought the sun orbited the earth and then apply them to the cutting edge of modern medicine are given free access to the press and, bizarrely, some say over public matters should be something we’re more concerned with than these experiments.

Besides being unimaginative, the connotations of monsters and immoral Mad Science™ inherent in bringing up Frankenstein are clear. Archbishop Cramner lightly questions the Cardinal for using language like ‘Monstrous’, he then goes on a diatribe about the evils of creating chimera-like monsters, mixes of humans and animals. If Cramner had read the BBC article, let alone done some more in-depth research, he’d know that chimeras are not a possibility here. Essentially all these scientists are doing is taking an animal egg, scooping out the genetic material, sticking some human DNA and letting it grow a little, then stopping that and harvesting the cells it’s produced to research fixes for serious conditions. We are talking about small balls of cells that lack neurones, lack alone anything resembling a brain. There’s no chimera here, even if it were to develop it’s not going to come out with paws or a trunk, there is no non-human DNA present (ignoring the fact that most human DNA is animal DNA anyway). In fact there is no evidence these embryos are even capable of developing (which is one reason why implantation is forbidden). But those facts are inconvenient, these are immoral and monstrous scientists and politicians who have turned away from God and abusing the power they stole from him to create a mockery of life. Science Is Bad.

Something Cramner said caught my eye:

But the Cardinal’s concern (and that of many Christians, Jews and Muslims) is more to do with the spiritual status of the chimera – that is, its ensoulment, and the sanctity of its existence. If humans are made ‘in the image of God’, in whose image is something that is part human part animal? And does such a creation have ‘human rights’, ‘animal rights’, both or none?

Here I should point out here that often groups who campaign strongest for the human rights of microscopic life-forms tend to give far less of a crap about the fully grown real deal. You might think these positions were hypocritical, but no, the common thread is that too many of these people (and the Catholic Church is especially guilty) treat souls are more important than actual lives, this is one of the fundamental divides between humanistic and theistic morality. The idea of souls is one of those concepts that stands constantly against doing good, humanitarian work, but makes no sense whatsoever. We can map different areas of our mental state to physical actions in our brain. If you damage or inject drugs into the brain, people’s personalities change, so that’s done in the brain, not the soul. Brain damage can affect memory: so that’s done in the brain: not the soul. At the end of the day there is nothing about our minds that doesn’t have a correlation with physical activity in the brain. What the hell is a soul doing?

If I suffer brain damage late in life and live a few more years before dying, does my soul possess my original capacities and personality when I die? What if I was brain-damaged at birth and that state was mine for my entire life? Which one do I get then? The truth is our brains account for the entirety of our mind and any metaphysical soul is entirely outside the picture. If there are souls they are not responsible for memory or personality, the best they could be is lifeboats that carry away copies of those things when they die, which is far less than the role today’s religions bestow on them.

Creating these hybrids isn’t ‘playing’ God; it’s using our power to manipulate life responsibly by using it to fix some of the most vexing conditions of the age and taking our responsibilities seriously by placing limits on its use according to valid ethical principles. Tampering with nature shouldn’t on principle be a problem, nature gave us a body poorly designed to stand on its hind legs and with a nasty predisposition to drop dead without constant unnatural medical meddling. I really don’t see the problem in trying to fix that.

This idea Cramner brings up of a human/not-human divide is simplistic, untrue and demonstrates the limitations of that way of looking at the world. It’s what Dawkins calls the ‘tyranny of the discontinuous mind’, our need to put things into categories that in reality don’t exist. If I lined all my ancestors up next to each other, right back to the most primitive creature, is there a magical point at which they stop being animals and start being humans? There is no point at which Species A becomes Species B, we simply start classifying them differently (usually made easier because the individuals in between no longer exist). More to the point: At what point did my ancestors start having souls? Does the genetic material construct an antenna to lure a soul in? Or is there a magical soul-grabbing enzyme that’s only present in human eggs? Did God decide one day: ‘Hmm….Now’ and start bestowing souls on those hapless creatures? If we found an intermediary species between humans our ape-like ancestors wandering in the jungle, theologians would be aghast! A clearly intelligent, but clearly non-human creature? Is it human or an animal? Does it have a soul or not?

Human life is special because it’s self-aware and intelligent, not because it has a soul. A metaphysical soul that exists independent of the brain is a fantasy, and not a harmless one: People are suffering and dying because of it.

If it’s capable of feeling pain, then it’s self aware and we should care. If there’s a complex brain, then it’s sentient and we should care. If neither of these things has happened and safeguards are in place to prevent it happening, there is utterly no reason why we should care what scientists do with these pre-embryonic cells. It would be a tragedy if this nonsense prevented research that could help alleviate the suffering of millions of people and instead sacrificing them on the altar to a purely philosophical concept.