So, my church is going through Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. The second item within the 40-day book is “You are not an accident.” With this as the follow-up.
Your parents may have been good, bad, or indifferent. It doesn’t matter: God had a design for you before you were even born, with the combination of DNA inside your body determined.
Immediately, the reality that soon enough (if some rogue nation hasn’t already) a cloned human being will be created. No mother, no father, just a sequenced genome injected into a sterilized embryo. It begins dividing and gestating, with a person resulting 40 weeks later. Maybe less if we accelerate the process.
It’s a synthesized person, essentially the story of Pygmalion come true. There are lots of dystopian side effects to consider: Will this capability be used to breed the Alphas -> Epsilons of Brave New World? Will we see armies of cloned soldiers with all fear and remorse removed, like Star Wars Storm Troopers or Doctor Who Sontarans?
But, beyond that, how does one integrate a synthetic person into any sort of theological framework? The general ethos of any (Western) theology is: God is separate from me, and I have an immortal component within me that came from Him. If you trace my lineage far enough back, you will reach an initial Man and Woman formed by Him. At the end of my life, that component will either return to that initial area of perfection or…not.
When (saying ‘If’ seems naive) we break that chain and create a person out of impossibly complex sequences of A,C, and G ourselves, it’s an ethical mess, no matter how you look at it.
That’s really it. I’ve no cosmic answers, nor any hypotheses about the state of such an individual’s soul, just this hypothetical:
What does it imply to the creation, and–moreover–what does it imply about us?
My inclination: **When that day happens, we will be fully realized monsters ourselves. **
Other questions that correlate:
- Is it different to “print” a human instead of, say, a bacterium?
- Is this fundamentally different than the Singularity, in which machines or other devices are imbued with consciousness? Is that creating ’life’?
This kind of crap is why Science Fiction is so popular…oh the narrative possibilities. Thing is, this is reality.