The Task of Theological Humanism
102
powerful instance of this technological outlook. When Dolly was cloned in 1997 – a sheep cloned from the udder cell of a 6-year-old ewe – an article in Developments in genetics and also the Human Genome Project are a The Economist noted:
This makes her [Dolly] trebly significant. She brings closer the time when it may be possible to clone a human. The technology that produced her will probably make it far easier to alter the genetic make-up of animals ... and she answered some questions scientists want answered about the role of DNA as creatures develop into fully grown adults. 15
Subsequent cloning of a black bull from a stem cell (a cell without a special-ized function) furthered the process. At the far end of these developments are questions about human cloning. These questions about human life accompany the modern developments in genetics, from the discovery of
DNA (1945–70) through the developing of recombinant DNA techniques (genetic engineering, 1970–95), to the developments in the 1990s and the Human Genome Project: a detailed map of the human genome that will reveal the basic “instructions” for the development and functioning of the
human. Our technological capacities now shape our own nature. As the theologian Paul Ramsey once put it, “those who come after us may not be like us.”humans that is genetically different than us? What do we owe future life? (^16) We must ask: What is our responsibility to a future species of
challenge. Throughout much of Western history, “nature” was a term for what defines something as what it most essentially is. For example, the nature of a human being, in the classical Aristotelian definition, is to be a rational, Technology bears on conceptions of “nature” itself. This is the second
social animal. More specifically, while human beings are social creatures and linked to other animals, it is “reason,” classical thinkers held, that denotes the specific difference between humans and other creatures. In a connected sense, nature represented a domain of reality, opposed to “super-nature,” that
was the condition for temporal existence but also the limits on existence. The regularity of seasons, of light and dark, the subtle balance of ecosystems, sustain life on this planet, and yet natural creatures are also limited, they are mortal. The idea of the human, we know from previous chapters, inscribes
within the name the idea of mortality, earth-bound.they constitute a threat to locality, basic goods, and the preciousness of the earth. The capacity of human beings to intervene and change forms of life Each of these senses of nature may now have come to an end. Together,
at the most basic genetic level or to alter ecosystems seems to imply that