The times of Huxley’s Brave New World are not only upon us, they are rapidly being surpassed. A recent copy of Scientific American magazine forecasts that within the next 10 years we will see a human clone, artificial wombs, replacement body parts, genetic vaccines, and foods that counteract various ailments. The longer term future holds out the prospect of a genome project of the human brain, human head transplants, computers with intelligence far beyond human capabilities, and the answer to age­ing. This is our bionic future, the result of the fusion of technology and biology in the third millennium. It is the next great human revolution and it is already happen­ing.

The changes expected in this brave new world of genetic engineering and human cloning are so momentous that they raise two of the most ancient human questions: What is man? Why are we here? These are questions about ultimate beliefs and values. Biology and technology are asking them but only philosophy and religion can answer them. These questions need urgent answers for a number of reasons.

First, the ethical debate and the formu­lation of public policy in these areas is trail­ing far behind the scientific discoveries and breakthroughs that are occurring almost every day. Agreement about ethical norms is always going to be difficult in a pluralis­tic culture, and even when this happens they may be overtaken by events. People need to remember that science and tech­nology are not self-regulating, and restraint is abhorrent to many scientists.

Second, the new technologies and their frontiers are developing at the very time that the values of applied medicine are changing. There is a new clinical medicine emerging that aims simply at relieving suf­fering and enhancing and prolonging life without considering the techniques used to achieve these ends. The older Hippocratic-Christian tradition of medicine, based on trust and respect for the human person as an individual, is disappearing.

Third, most of the leaders in the field of medicine and bionics today are not Christians. Ethically they are utilitarians, which means that they make moral judg­ments solely on the basis of the utility/use­fulness of practical outcomes. They do not believe that actions are right or wrong in themselves. They also believe in the scien­tific imperative, which says that if some­thing is experimentally possible then it’s morally permissible! This is the moral method that has led ethicists like Peter Singer to advocate infanticide and euthana­sia.

Fourth, most Christians and churches are unaware and unprepared for the revolu­tion that is already engulfing us. The churches are weak just when they need to be strong in their theological understand­ing, moral convictions and general knowledge of developments. This is a time for religious commitment, ethical alertness and corporate action on the part of the Christian community. Otherwise the worst scenarios of the brave new world will become irreversible and our children and their children will suffer the conse­quences.

How should Christians respond to our bionic future?

First, Christians should avoid blanket condemnation of all experiments and appli­cations of biotechnology. There is a bright side and a dark side to the new technolo­gies. The bright side in the genetic testing of embryos, for example, means eliminat­ing some very damaging genetic defects before birth; the dark side of this same pro­cedure is the decision to eliminate the embryos instead of the genetic diseases. So Christians need to be informed about the real facts, then learn to be discriminating on the basis of their biblical and ethical values. Christian also need to be able to say what it is that scientists can do, as well as what they may never do.

Second, Christians need to be clear about their distinctive worldview and to hold fast to it. Eventually the debate over our bionic future and the use of moderns technologies in medical science comes down to worldviews. The Christian world­view is a theistic one, centred around the Creator-creature distinction, with man choosing and acting responsibly under God, his Creator and Lord. The secular world view centres on man as absolute, with the natural world receiving its value and meanings from him, and with chance playing a leading role. Man may be Godlike but he is not God and must not be allowed to play God.

Third, Christians need to affirm in a special way the following truths about the human person since the heart of the debate lies in a doctrine of man.

The human person is God’s creature. In asking and answering the question “what is man?” the Bible positions human beings within the universe by relating them to a personal Creator God. This Creator God is amazingly generous toward us, and has entrusted us with lordly responsibility for the world (Psalm 8). Since the Enlightenment, people in the West have thought about themselves one-dimension­ally and used the model of mathematics to quantify everything in their experience, including human beings. Strange as it may sound in this age of information overload, people actually need more knowledge, not less. By this we mean a different kind of knowledge, the real self-knowledge that comes from knowing God in Jesus Christ. We need wisdom (how to live) as much as knowledge (that we live), if we are to con­trol our bionic future and survive.

The human person is God’s steward. At creation God told human beings to subdue the earth (Gen 1:28). There is a fine line between harvesting the natural resources of the world for God’s glory and manipulating them for our own. There is much in our bionic future that threatens to step over that line. Cloning of humans would be an obvious example of this kind of transgress­ing. There must therefore be some self-imposed limits to what people should do, as distinct from what they may be able to do. “A man of serious conscience means to say in raising urgent ethical questions that there may be some things that men should never do” (Paul Ramsey).

The human person is the image of God (Gen 1:26f). What this entails exactly is unclear but what we do know is that this is the distinctively Christian way of defining what human beings essentially are. The practical implications of this are immense.

According to the biblical revelation, human beings, like all of creation, were cre­ated in order to glorify God. But human beings were created with a distinct and unique capacity to know, reverence, wor­ship, and glorify the Creator. God made human beings, male and female, of his own good pleasure, in his own image, and to his own sovereign purpose. Thus, human beings are not mere biological artifacts or accidental forms of life. The special, pur­poseful, and direct creation of every human being in the image of God is central to the Christian worldview. Modernity’s rejection and refutation of that revealed knowledge has set the stage for the rise of abortion, euthanasia, genetic manipulation, infanti­cide, and even genocide, all in the name of social responsibility and personal auton­omy.Albert Mohler

Only this biblical view of human beings can save us from the reductionist view that says that people are merely cells or genes.

The human person is sacred. If the human beings are God’s image-bearers, even in their fallenness (Jas 3:9), then it fol­lows that every human being is unique as an individual and innately valuable. Practically this means that no operation or experiment should be carried out without the consent of the individual concerned, and that does not actually benefit that individual. The sanctity of human life resides in our uniquely personal qualities since God him­self is the absolute Personality. These begin when we are conceived and continue until we die (and even then they do not cease). The absence or loss of certain human pow­ers before we are borne or before we die in no way contradicts the sacred status of every member of the human family, nor removes their God-given right to life.

The human person is fallen. This shows itself in the use human beings make of their cultural instruments and skills. The story of the tower of Babel early in the biblical record (Gen. 11) illustrates this bias in human nature to compete with God and to dispense with his restraints. The Bible alone gives us a realistic doctrine of evil. Without it people will be lulled into false securities and allow the end (therapies and cures) to justify the means (destruction of embryos or the mixing of species) in bionic medi­cine. The new technologies present us with possibilities for deciding our own destiny and using God-like powers. Undoubtedly therein lies their appeal for some in the scientific community. The dark litany of hor­rendous events in the 20^th century should warn us against a worse repetition in the 21^st.

In conclusion,

A pluralistic, secular world needs the moral sustenance that a transcen­dent God brings to it. It is this Creator God who makes human beings both valu­able and responsible. Moreover, the plural­istic, secular world needs to be provoked and unsettled by a Christian perspective. Pure secularity can degenerate into ‘what­ever is happening ought to happen’ or ‘whatever we can do we should do’. A Christian approach to bioethics offers a needed transcendent perspective that pro­tects us from the worst in our natures and our world, while explaining and encourag­ing the best.Scott Rae & Paul Cox