August 19, 2005
cloning
Last Monday, we heard about an apparent breakthrough in China when their scientists successfully cloned their first pig. And probably just about 6 days before this report, the South Korean scientist announced their success in creating the world’s first cloned dog, SNUPPY. Are these animals all following the footsteps of Dolly, the world first cloned sheep, who was put to sleep at age seven – halfway through a normal lifespan – after it suffered from arthritis and degenerative lung disease?
Being a genetics grad who used to clone like one gene of a fly, and a person who strongly believes in a Creator God, these report sure caught my attention, and it sparked in me a thought process, a time of questioning on the meaning behind all these and the consequences of it relating to one’s purpose and destiny. After all, all these testing on animals are means to advance to human cloning.
So what if a human is successfully cloned? Are they any less of a person? Are they created in God’s image? If they are treated right and well accepted by the society, what difference does it make? Does it really matter if you are a clone? And ultimately, does God love them? I started this search wishing to find an answer to all these apparent questions.
As I venture into this quest, I find that my aspiration to answer these few questions is slowly overtaken by my growing understanding on the one question that matters, that we must first understand before we carry out a life-giving message to the world, this one question which seems to surpass all the other vacuous ones, and the reality of it can be understood only in relation to God.
What is not right about cloning? What has gone wrong?
Christians believe that God created human in his own image. It bears the divine stamp and life is sacred for it is a gift from the Creator. The naturalist however, believes that life arose from the primordial sea through a chance collision of chemical, and that over billions of years of chance mutations, or otherwise called biological accident. This worldview has been widely accepted and with the philosophies that emerged with the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, philosophies that establishes human mind as the judge of all truth, they eventually rendered God irrelevant and nonexistent. With that kind of worldviews feeding our intellect, human beings became their own god, setting their own laws and are free to do whatever they find pleasure or power.
Professor Robert George of Princeton went even further to suggest that our body is just a little more than a machine operated by the mind, it is an instrument that can be used by ‘me’ for whatever purpose I choose with no moral significance. Human life has been reduced to almost plain utilitarian.
With that worldview dominating our world, it is not hard to see why cloning is now raging. If life is simply the result of a chance naturalistic process, why shouldn’t we control our own genes or created new life forms? We are simply adapting a natural process to its most advantage use. Looking at all the reasons and benefits to cloning, how the clone can one day save their siblings from some incurable diseases with their bodies, at the expense of their mortality, and how gay and lesbian couples can have their own child, and how it can make a couple financially secure, and how it can improve parent-child relationship by knowing and designing the genes of your child, and how it helps to give you a better sense of identity, and how it is a step to immortality…
What has this world become? Man has lost their reverence for the sovereign and all powerful God. The selfish and power-hungry nature we see now is not dissimilar to that in the Garden of Eden, but what is so distinct here is this selfishness and power-seeking without boundaries. Lawlessness crowds their being. They not only wants to be their own god, they want to dominate and to be in position of power and control. By cloning human or another beings ‘in their own image or likeness’, they feel like god; they get their dose of ecstasy entertaining their egocentric nature.
Unlike us human when we were created by God with love and a purpose and a destiny, these clone were ‘created’ to fulfill man’s selfish desires. It is all about their own agenda and what they want to do with this utilitarian unit. The question about their purpose and destiny is nonextant in the mind of their ‘creator’.
So does God care? Yes, because this is His Creation, we are His Creation and He is concern about every single detail that is going on on Planet Earth, and that in itself is a great relief!!
Ezekiel 33:10 – 11:
Now as for you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus you have spoken, saying. “Surely our transgressions and our sins are upon us, and we are rotting away in them: how then can we survive?”
Say to them, ‘As I live!’ declares the Lord God, ‘I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways! Why then will you die, O house of Israel?’
As for all my previous questions, I don’t think they really matters…
Posted by melanie at August 19, 2005 12:26 AM