God's Will Versus Genetics

I've added a large new section to my page on evolution: "Evolution and Unintelligent Design: Religion: God's Will Versus Genetics" by Vexen Crabtree. The online version is formatted better and is footnoted:

Many religionists, especially conservative Christians in the USA and fundamentalists around the world, oppose Humankind's intervention in genetics. "Some, like Leon Kass, the former head of President Bush's bioethics council, regard genetic interventions as humankind's contemporary replay of the Tower of Babel episode". They say we 'shouldn't play God', that genetic engineering is a Promethean seizure of God's power. A poll in 1997 revealed that 70% of Americans said only God should have the power to interfere with inherited traits, following on from polls in the 1980s that saw two-thirds of Americans declare that the altering of human genes was against God's will.

I will now offer four arguments that genetic engineering is in accordance with God's will - and also offer one cheeky argument that at the very least, genetic engineering foils the Devil's plans! So for those of us who don't believe in such dualisms, take the following with a philosophical pinch of salt:

1. Firstly, God doesn't have control over inherited traits. If there is a God, and it designed the way nature works, then it relinquished its control of inheritability when it chose to create genes. Genes are subject solely to the deterministic laws of physics and chemistry. These laws run without God's interference; the genes that we inherit result from natural cause and effect in accordance with fixed physical laws, not from God's will. There is only one reason why God would create such roundabout way of facilitating the inheritance of traits: because it wanted to place genetics within the grasp of human biological sciences. If it did not want us to consciously examine and improve our genes, then God would not have made them accessible. Traits would be picked by god and bestowed upon individuals by magic, without a physical intermediary (DNA) doing the job. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then DNA exists in the physical world (rather than the spiritual one) for a reason: God has placed DNA within our reach to see what we will do.
   
   
2. The desire to eradicate disease is the desire to help others; it is a moral impulse derived from our best social instincts. The expression of this desire through advanced science provides us with new methods of preventing disease. If God's test is to see if we will do the right thing, then, my bets are with the geneticists. Those who wish to let disease run its course, and let mutant genes continue to cause disease, are the ones who are interfering with God's will. It is God's place to punish humankind for transgressions, not our place to punish ourselves (and those around us) by failing to fight disease and biological dysfunction.
   
   
3. Thirdly, exegesis: Christians will remember that in their 'Old Testament' it implores humankind to govern nature. God has placed DNA within the realm of nature, the same as it placed seeds and plants within our grasp. We took those seeds and plants and selectively bred them to create many crops that over thousands of years, have become intensely genetically modified by us. Consider that the Bible grants us "animal husbandry". There was no phrase in the Hebrew vocabulary for genes or evolution, but husbandry is a sexual term that implies the act of mixing male chromosomes with those of a female egg, to produce life. This is genetic in nature. The next section on this page details advances we have already made with crops and with our creation of domesticated species such as cows, pigs and cats. These animals did not originate in nature - we created them without causing the heaven's to rain fire on the Egyptians or Indians.
   

   "The same Genesis narratives that many read as a source of the prohibition confer on human beings the task of governing and tending to nature. Throughout the Bible, agriculture, animal husbandry, metalworking, and many other technological interventions in nature are permitted and even approved."
   

   "Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice"
   Ronald M. Green (2007)

   
   

   
   

   Human achievements with crops and domesticated animals are much more extreme that the simple genetic engineering changes we would implement now, such as removing genes mutations that cause certain diseases, and adding vitamin-producing genes to common crops. This is small fry to what we have already achieved. It's not that the religionists are opposed to the results, its just that they perceive continued scientific achievements to be a threat to their general religious worldview.

   
   
4. Finally, genetic engineering may aid in the fight against the Devil! Genetic engineering will eventually absolve us of the need to kill livestock to feed ourselves. Researchers have already grown meat in laboratories, from germlines extracted from animals. Such meat is the real thing, but is grown without the need for a living organism surrounding it. It is maintained by the laboratory as fresh, non-living meat. Manufacturing on reasonable scales in so far impossible, but in the future it will be possible, and the barbaric era of animal slaughter will start to enter history for good. This underlines our final argument. The food chain is designed so that in order to survive, living beings have to kill and destroy each other. The whole food chain is based on blood and death. This is the design of an evil genius, not of a good god. Likewise for gene mutations (which cause the suffering of many innocent and unborn children) and other biological dysfunctions. No good God would have created such a flawed biological world. If it genetics is a chance at dashing the devil's (apparent) designs, then, we should give no hesitation!