Can We Prevent the Abolition of Man?

The Wilberforce Forum

An Address to U.S. Congress Members and Staff

I would like to take you back some time and describe to you a laboratory, a gray building in
London. In that building, and in one of the laboratories deep inside, there is a conveyer belt
moving from one side of the room to the other. On that conveyer belt are little glass jars, and in
those glass jars are fertilized ova, and they are clattering back and forth on the conveyer belt as
they go from one side of the room to the other. Those fertilized ova will break into 96 separate
buds, and each of those buds will mature into an embryo, and each one of those embryos will
mature into a human being.

Interestingly enough, the people who are conducting this experiment have figured out how to pre-
program genetically what each person who will be created in that test tube will be. Some will be
laborers, some will be congressman, some will be business leaders. They are all predestined. Those
of us who are of the Reformed tradition believe in predestination, but this is the ultimate
predestination because you can make a genetic determination right in the test tube. Does anybody
know what scene I am talking about from popular literature? Of course, Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World, published in 1931. It may have been the most prophetic writing of the 20th Century
— even more than George Orwell’s 1984.

The story of Brave New World is fascinating because of the parallels if offers to what is happening
today in the biotechnology revolution. The story of Brave New World was about creating the
ultimate utopian vision of the perfect society. Everybody would be given a soma, a pill, a narcotic,
which would allow them to be lulled into pleasure. If they felt any momentary depression, they
would just pop another soma. Free sex was encouraged. The goal of the state was to entertain and
amuse. This was the scenario that prompted Neil Postman, the great TV critic and professor at
New York University, to write his marvelous book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

In the introduction to that book, Postman uses the Brave New Word example because what Huxley
saw is what Orwell didn’t see. Orwell saw that there would be tyranny, but he believed it would
come from totalitarian powers trying to hold us in their grip. But Huxley saw something different.
He said there would be a tyranny all right, but it would be a tyranny in which they would lull the
people into passivity. They would amuse them constantly, keeping them entertained, giving them
all the sex they wanted, all the drugs they wanted, and that’s how they would control them.

Those who dispense the entertainment and pleasure are the controllers of society. Everybody is
pre-programmed with particular jobs because they’re genetically determined. It’s a great novel, by
the way, if you haven’t read it — marvelous entertainment. The central drama is the story of one
character, described as a savage from New Mexico because he still remembers his birth parents. He
was not created, like all the others, in the test tube. He is subversive because he has family
attachments; therefore, the state determines he has to be exterminated; otherwise the whole
experiment, which depends on dissolving the family, won’t work. So the challenge of Brave New
World is how to get rid of this one subversive, who still remembers what it is to have a mother and
a father.

You can see the parallels with our own time if you realize that all the campaigns of the utopian
thinkers of our own day are expressions of what Huxley was prophesying in 1931. In order to
control society, you’ve got to break down all those structures that lay claim to a person’s
fundamental loyalties, such as the family. Ultimately, I would say, that’s what’s behind the gay
right’s agenda today.

Gays I have talked to don’t really want to get married! They much prefer the freedom of going
from one relationship to another. So behind their entire agenda is an effort to weaken the family,
because so long as the family remains the primary source of loyalty for most individuals, then the
government — the powers that be, along with the cultural and media elite — does not have the
ultimate control over how we live our lives. That issue is at the heart of my book, How Now Shall
We Live? I was trying to show that only a biblical understanding of reality, lived out in all of life,
enables us to live together peacefully and in harmony, and in concord with the way God created us.
Otherwise personal autonomy becomes the ultimate rebellion against God.

The Ultimate Rebellion

Think about it! We have made self-interest the summum bonum, the ultimate good of our way of
life. This is an attitude that came out of the 1960s: personal autonomy as the perfect anti-God state.
It’s one thing to be autonomous from political interference in your life, but unlimited autonomy, in
defiance of the way we’re made, is a rejection of God. It’s the opposite of dependence on the
Creator. Recently, we’ve seen rulings from the Supreme Court — such as Roe v. Wade and its
successor — that aspire to create this ultimate state of personal autonomy, in defiance of the
biblical alternative.

But the ultimate rebellion is to shake your fist at the Creator, saying, "I am not going to accept the
fact that I have been created by God. I am going to create myself. I am going to create my own
human race." And I believe this is what Huxley saw. In fact, he saw exactly what Rousseau saw
150 years earlier. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom I believe to be one of the most
pernicious influences in modern history, was the toast of Paris society during the French
Enlightenment. He was the intellectual darling whose writings were so enjoyed and appreciated by
that very decadent society in the middle of the eighteenth century. Rousseau had a mistress who
gave birth to several illegitimate children; but Rousseau couldn’t be bothered with taking care of
them, so he dumped them at an orphanage, and at a time when most would surely end up dead.
Paul Johnson, the great English historian, believes this is the direct cause of Rousseau’s later
claims that the state could do a better job of raising kids than the family.

We will probably never know whether Rousseau was simply justifying what he had done, but the
fact of the matter is that he gave his own children up to be raised by the state. The modern idiom
says, "It takes a village to raise the children." It is better, they say, to get the state involved in child-
rearing. The whole idea of day care is at issue here, but this is all an outgrowth of ideas originally
advanced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They were fashionable in eighteenth-century Paris, and now
they’re fashionable once again.
But make no mistake! Issues such as cloning will become the leading edge of the biotech
movement, and this is an area where the conflict between biotechnology and bioethics can be
clearly seen. For cloning is the ultimate personal autonomy, the ultimate rebellion against God, the
ultimate shaking of the fist in the face of God, and saying that we can create people the way we
want them. Cloning allows social programmers and government agencies to dispense with the
family and make the community (or the cultural elites, as Huxley saw it) responsible for raising
our children.

Those of you who have attended this seminar the past five weeks have participated in talks and
discussions about the biotech movement, and the public policy issues that flow out of it. You’ve
used words like "biotech" and "bioethics." But it’s important for all of us to understand the
differences between these terms. Biotechnology refers to scientific processes that enable us to
break down cell structure, to be able to see the DNA content. The biotech movement is on the
threshold of genetic feats that were unimaginable even a decade ago; it’s a huge advance in
science, and a huge commercial enterprise as well.

Bioethics, on the other hand, deals with right conduct in this area of study, and this is really where
the Christian has a particular responsibility. Christians should never be anti-science or anti-
progress. I can’t be, because the more science discovers about the DNA, the more it reveals that we
are the products of an Intelligent Designer. Mathematics doesn’t come about as the result of a
chance collision of atoms in a primordial soup! Science shows that there’s a lot more to it that that,
and the more we learn, the better our apologetic defense of Christian truth becomes. So I am all for
it! But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to be circumspect, exercising ethical discretion in such
matters.

What Aldous Huxley saw and what C.S. Lewis also saw, though coming at it from very different
perspectives, was that you can never separate science from morality. So what Christians should be
saying today is, "We welcome the biotech movement because it will bring about great advances in
human progress. It will bring about a better understanding of the composition of the body, and will
in the process confirm what we believe about the intelligent design of human beings. But we want
bioethics to have equal stature with biotechnology. We need to be able to look at what is right and
wrong in our behavior as well as our science.

The Technological Imperative

We have been dominated in Western culture the past two hundred years or so by what I call the
"technological imperative." Basically, it says that if something can be done, it will be done. If
scientists can invent something, they are going to invent it. And cloning, my friends, is no more
than a year away from taking place — the cloning of human beings!

You probably saw the news: A group of multi-national doctors announced in Rome in early 2001
that they will go ahead and clone a human being, despite protests from many quarters, and the best
evidence we have at this time is that this is eminently biologically doable. The only question is,
who’s asking whether we should do it? Ethics, you see, deals with the "ought" factor; this is, what
we ought to do. Science deals with the is factor; it describes what is. Science tells us what can be
done, not what ought to be done. This is the province of moral and ethical judgment, and
Christians must be prepared to bring this particular dimension to the debate. We may listen to
science when it says what can be done, but technology must always be tempered by the ethics of
what ought to be done.

But that’s the problem. How do we have ethics in a relativistic era? Relativistic ethics is an
oxymoron; yet, relativism is the prevailing zeitgeist or spirit of our age. This is what people today
tend to believe: There is no absolute truth. Truth is whatever you say it is. Absolute truth is
unknowable, they say. We are facing an epistemological crisis in American education because
people don’t think this through, and even our seminaries have failed to address the question
adequately. They don’t ask, "Can we know something?" which is what epistemology is supposed
to do. Instead, they merely assume we cannot.

The fact is, we can know something. Revelation gives us knowledge, both natural revelation and
special revelation. I won’t get off onto that subject, but because there is such wide-spread
skepticism (and agnosticism), many people truly believe that we cannot know that something is
absolutely true. Therefore, one person’s individual formulation of truth is as good as anybody
else’s. And this is the most desperate anarchy against divine authority.

The Christian believes that God has spoken, and that He has given us revelation. Behind all the
empirical evidence, we see the truth of that belief. That is why we become apologists for our faith,
because we can show that the biblical worldview is validated by reality as we see and measure it
empirically. We are not just saying, "Oh, the Bible says this or that, and you’ve got to believe it!"
We are saying, "The Bible says it, and we do believe it, but we can also show you that it’s true, and
that truth is ultimately knowable."

The greatest debate of our day, I believe, will prove to be the bioethics debate: a debate between
experimentation without restraint and the leavening of moral truth, which tells us what ought to be
done. And this concerns me. The leading bioethicist in America today — at least the most famous
bioethicist in America — is Princeton professor Peter Singer, whom all of you know. You have
read about him, and you laugh at him. But don’t laugh at him; he is eminently logical. He is
following his own basic pre-suppositions about life — to a certain degree. He talks about
infanticide being perfectly permissible within two years. Well, Peter Singer believes that life is the
result of natural processes. And if he believes that, then what he says is logical. What difference
does it make, in his view, when a baby is born deformed, or suffers from Down syndrome or
autism? [I have a grandson who is autistic, so I’m especially alert to this.] If we believe that child
is not going to live a worthwhile life, then why not just get rid of it? Kill it. We can dispose of it if
we believe it’s going to be a burden on society.

Singer is basically a utilitarian. He says: Do the greatest good for the greatest number. He also says
each of us should live on $30,000 a year, because then there would be enough money for
everybody. Everybody could live comfortably on that. He basically says there is no point in
keeping old people alive. He has said that repeatedly, because the elderly are no longer productive,
or useful to society. And if we believe in the greatest good for the greatest number, then why not
just get rid of old people?
Well, Christians believe in what God tells us by divine revelation, and we believe that God’s truth
can be empirically validated. But you can’t empirically validate Peter Singer’s worldview. In fact,
he, himself, can’t live with it either. He says he’s in favor of bestiality — he announced that
publicly not long ago — but he doesn’t engage in it. [At least, I hope he doesn’t.] He says publicly
that we should get rid of the elderly; yet, he spends his own money to keep his mother who has
Alzheimer’s on extended care. In fact, he can’t live with the logical conclusions of his own
worldview. His views just don’t hold up, because they are not true. And Peter Singer’s books and
speeches are still taken very seriously in academic circles, where he’s viewed as a top bioethicist.

If the Christian Church has anything to contribute to this debate, it should be here, in issues like
these. I believe this is the cutting else. Our battles over the family, the character of society,
personal autonomy, and over what is the ultimate virtue in life, turn on these issues. More and
more in coming years I think you’ll see that the biotech issues will become the biggest
battleground for the church. We tend to think the gay rights issues pending before the legislatures,
and all of the battles over the preservation of the family, and over taxes and the marriage penalty
are the big issues. We think these are important, and they are. But look just over the horizon and
you will see that the coming battles will be the ones Huxley identified, incredibly, in 1931. And
although he came at it from a totally different perspective, C. S. Lewis saw what Huxley saw and
expressed it with profound insight and eloquence.

The Worldview Imperative

But before I turn to Lewis, which I want to do in my conclusion, I need to deal for a moment with
another issue. Namely, how do we bring ethical restraint to bear on technology. Well, the answer is
not to become a Luddite, all too eager to deny the role of science and smash the machines of
industry! Christians are not against technology. Francis Collins, who heads the Human Genome
Project at the National Institutes of Health, is an evangelical Christian. We believe in the value of
science. Christians are eager for the new discoveries that will come out of technology. But we’re
saying, let’s be careful to tether those discoveries to moral truth. Let’s be sure the advances of
science are anchored in something we know to be ethically and morally true.

Is that possible? Well, I will make a radical statement, and I will stand here and debate it the rest of
the afternoon, if need be. That is, apart from the Christian worldview, it is impossible to have
ethics. Without a system beliefs rooted in revealed truth, ethics do not exist. You cannot come up
with an ethical formulation, or with universal absolutes of any kind, apart from biblical revelation.
Historically, throughout Western civilization, the Lex Divina has been the basis of what we call
"natural law," or what we identify as transcendent moral truth.

Thomas Jefferson tried to secularize it when he called it "the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God."
But Christians would say it is the Judeo-Christian revelation, out of Holy Scripture. But out of this
comes a body of understanding, which we have always regarded in the West as transcendent truth
that guides our behavior, that tempers the laws written by these men and women (the members of
Congress who are present today) and the rest of you. Lex Divina is the foundation; it is the
unchanging plumb line standard by which we measure everything else we do. But that kind of
undeniable authority is, frankly, impossible in a relativistic age.
In How Now Shall We Live? I tell the story of Dr. Louis Finkelstein who in 1939 foresaw the
coming war in Europe, and he realized that such a war would tear apart the Western democracies.
They would be struggling to preserve the vision of a free, liberal Western society. So he gathered
79 intellectuals at Riverside Heights in New York for a conference. The New York Times heralded
the event as the beginning of a new declaration of intellectual independence in America. Albert
Einstein was among them, along with Sydney Hook and many other luminary intellects of the day.
The first conference was held in 1940, and Dr. Finkelstein said they were going to develop a set of
universal ethics and absolute values, to under gird democracy through this time of world crisis,
when the free Western democracies were basically defending human dignity and the rights of man
against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

So they met. The New York Times covered the proceedings and reprinted their releases, verbatim,
on the front page. It was on the radio all across America. Everyone was talking about the
conference on society, technology, and philosophy. At the first meeting, they basically got to know
each other. They had some debates; Mortimer Adler held forth at length. But they decided they
really couldn’t go very far at that first meeting so they scheduled the second meeting a year later.
At the second meeting they really weren’t able to come to grips with anything they could all agree
on. But all the spirited debates were covered, once again, in the pages of the New York Times.

They decided to come together for a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time! At the sixth meeting, the
headline in the Times said, "Scholars confess that they are confused." They continued to meet for
twenty years, until, finally, Finkelstein gave up and said, we have no way of agreeing on what
absolutes should bind all people. Even if they knew what those absolutes were, they would never
have been able to apply them. We apply them in the wrong place today — again we see the
pernicious influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau famously wrote, in his paper The Social Contract, that "man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains." Man without social and moral restraints, he argued, is the noble
savage! I would suggest that anyone who believes in the "noble savage" has never held a child in
his arms. Anyone who has held a baby knows better — he is anything but a noble savage. We are
all born with a sinful disposition. One of the most fundamental teachings of the Christian
worldview is that we were born into Paradise, as God intended, and we fell into sin. That original
disobedience to God has bent, twisted, and distorted human nature, so that all of us are born in sin.

But the modern utopian doesn’t believe that, of course. The modern utopian says, "People are
basically good! We’re only corrupted by society." That was Rousseau’s point. And during the
Enlightenment period, Rousseau’s beliefs about the nature of man began to take hold, and by the
twentieth century they had become the dominant view in the West.

But if you really believe that, then you don’t believe that problems arise from individuals. Crimes
are not committed because people are sinful, but because they were born into a poor neighborhood.
Therefore, those born in poor neighborhoods have, in essence, a license to commit crimes! That’s
what they said in the sixties. They unleashed the idea that people are not really responsible for their
own behavior, and that the cause of crime is actually the ghetto, and the racism that people have to
endure. Therefore, we give criminals and wrong-doers a pass. We say, "What, you committed a
crime? Well, it’s not your fault, you know!" And we allow people to escape from any sense of
personal responsibility for their behavior, and this ideology was at the roots of the Great Society.

The Nature of Sin

Utopians have always believed that if we could create a perfect culture, people would live
peacefully within it. But the Christian says, no, people are born predisposed to sin, and therefore
they need to be restrained by moral truth and by the law. And they are responsible for their own
behavior.

Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and previously
professor of ethics at Clark University, tells a wonderful story. She once wrote a paper that said
that the real cause of moral and ethical failure in the world is the lack of individual responsibility.
The paper was published as a magazine article, and one of her colleagues on the faculty at Clark
came to her and said, "Oh, Christina, how could you have written that? I teach my class in ethics
that the real problem is the exploitation of the rain forest, and multi-national corporations, and the
oppression of the poor." She went through this whole litany about all the social injustices that need
to be remedied, and she said that’s what she was teaching her class.

But then, at the end of the semester, that same professor came back to Dr. Sommers, obviously
dejected, and she said, "I just had a terrible experience. One of the students in my ethics class has
cheated!" Sommers asked, what she was going to do about it, and she said, "I am going to get your
article on individual responsibility and make sure all my students read it!" Well, that woman was
converted because she suddenly realized you can talk till you’re blue in the face about social
justice, but the individual is still going to cheat. Human nature is predisposed to sin, and that’s the
truth.

The problem is not in the structures of society, it’s in the individual. We are all born in sin. We
need to work on justice and righteousness within the structures of society, of course, but we must
realize that the problem is us. So if all we’re trying to do is reform society, we’ll never solve the
problem. But if ethics means restraining sinful behavior, that is going to be the answer.
Unfortunately, secularists today are looking in the wrong places, just as Peter Singer is looking in
the wrong places.

But that brings us to another question: Even if Peter Singer knew what was right, could he do it?
This is a very old but important question. If you don’t want to labor through Tolstoy’s great novel,
War and Peace, which is a big, wonderful book, then I suggest you rent the movie at a video store.
It’s about events that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, as seen through the eyes of
a hapless character named Pierre Bezukhov. It is a great story, filled with Christian influence and
moral truth, particularly at the end where the gospel is explicitly presented. But in the film there is
a memorable scene in which Pierre, played here by a young Henry Fonda, collapses in a moment
of utter despair. Everything has gone wrong in his life. He is always in the wrong place at the
wrong time, and he stumbles over things constantly. So finally he looks up at the sky and cries,
"Why is it that I know what is right, and do what is wrong?"

You’ll recognize this as the lament of Romans chapter seven! And it’s our lament as well. The
problem for the world today is that, even if we could tell people what is right, and even if they
agreed to try to live by a certain standard, that still wouldn’t solve the problem. Because we know
what is right and persistently do what is wrong.

The Greek word ethos means a stall, something that doesn’t move. Mores, on the other hand, from
the Latin, means "customs and habits." Ethics are absolutes, while morals are changeable. But even
if we knew the absolute standards and could get all the people in America to agree to live by them,
we wouldn’t solve our problem. Immanuel Kant’s "categorical imperative" is the Golden Rule
slightly modified: It says, "Act only on that maxim that you can at the same time will to be a
universal law." Or, expressed differently, "That which you choose to do, you will therefore that
everyone should do." For many years this was the foundation of secular ethics. When I studied
philosophy and political philosophy at Brown University, I understood this perfectly. I had spent a
lot of time thinking about ethical questions of this kind.

I grew up in a very puritanical home. My dad was a hard-working guy. He went to law school at
night, working six days a week during the Depression, back at the beginning of World War II. We
were struggling to exist at a time of great economic turmoil. I didn’t see much of him during the
week, but on Sunday afternoons we would sit together on the back porch. And I remember him
saying, "Chuck, the most important thing in life is ‘Don’t ever lie.’" The second most important
thing, he said, is, "Do a hard day’s work in whatever you do, and work for excellence."

My dad wasn’t a Christian, although I would love to think that he was a believer — he died right
after my conversion, and I never really had that opportunity to witness to him. But he certainly
reflected Christian truth. He taught me about always telling the truth. In fact, I was the only person
indicted in the Watergate scandals who was never charged with perjury, because I was afraid to lie.
I was afraid I would let my father down. So, you see, I had as good puritanical training as anybody
could possibly get.

I was practicing law, making a six-figure income, in the 1960s, when President Richard Nixon was
elected and asked me to come to the White House. I believed it was my duty to serve, so I said yes.
I took everything I had earned in the law practice, and all the holdings and real estate interests I
had accumulated, and I put them in a blind trust. [I’ll tell you how to make a small fortune: Take a
slightly larger fortune and put it in a blind trust with a bank in Boston, and you’ll end up with a
small fortune! I discovered how much it cost me when I got out of the White House!]

But I was scrupulously honest. I would never accept a gift in the White House. If somebody gave
me a gift of any kind, I would send it down to the telephone operators or to the sergeant who drove
my car. I gave everything away. I didn’t ever want to be compromised. I wouldn’t even see
anybody I had practiced law with before I went to the White House. Ha! Imagine! I worried about
that, and I ended up going to prison! Why? Because there is nothing more deceitful than the human
heart. Every one of us has an infinite capacity for rationalization and self-deception. There is no
way we can really monitor ourselves.

[I recently turned down a very great honor because I thought it was exalting me instead of the
Lord. It was a university chair in my name. The fellow I turned down, the College president, called
and said, "Oh, Chuck, you are a wonderfully humble man," and I felt good about being humble.
And then I thought, that’s bad, too! You can’t win!]
The Spiritual Element
C.S. Lewis wrote about this human dilemma in a wonderful essay called "Men without Chests," in
which he talks about the beginnings of today’s deconstructionist movement. He writes about the
critical notion that literature is not what the writer means, but what the reader makes of it. When he
wrote that essay in the late 40s there were just the beginning signs of deconstruction, of taking
away the objective truth and authority of words and making them subjective. What Lewis said is
that we are destroying objective truth, and we losing the capacity to do what we ought to do
because we have taken away the "chest." In other words, we have taken away the spiritual element.
The passions of the stomach cannot be ruled by the rationality of the mind; it takes the spirit and
the will to rule the passions. And in a more explicit Christian way, we would say that it takes the
transformation of the human heart in order for us to do what is good, even when we know what is
good and right.

Lewis gave us the wonderful line: "We make men without chests. We mock at honor, and then we
are shocked when there are traitors in our midst. We castrate, and bid the geldings multiply." We
have ignored the spiritual dimension of our lives and in the process we have lost the ability to
control the human passions.

I would argue from my own experience that ethics is impossible. Consider Paul’s words: "For the
good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Rom. 7:19). "What shall we
say then?" he asks, "is the law sin? God forbid!" Perish the thought. But he confesses, "I had not
known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, ‘Thou shalt not
covet’" (Rom. 7:7-8). In other words, without the law, there would be no sin. So it is impossible to
have an ethical system that is not based on a standard of transcendent truth and obeyed by people
who have a will transformed by the living God. Not everybody is going to be in that position, but
those of us who are Christians have a responsibility, and this is particularly urgent in the debate
over cloning.

The debates over today’s biotech revolution brings us back to foundational truth. Believe me, this
is no easy matter, and there is big money invested in this revolution. Just look at what Wall Street
has done with the biotech firms making new discoveries. Those stocks are shooting up, and there’s
big money behind it. We still have to say we are not against scientific progress, but we always
want it tied to moral truth. Otherwise, we will end up creating the ultimate Brave New World,
where we can decide ahead of time what a person is going to be.

Aldous Huxley was the grandson of T.H. Huxley who was known as "Darwin’s bulldog." T.H.
Huxley was an evolutionist, too, and he was involved in the eugenics fads of that day. Margaret
Sanger came out of that movement, leading the Planned Parenthood movement. The whole
eugenics movement came out of that mind-set.

But coming from the opposite pole was C. S. Lewis, a professor of Medieval literature. He was a
true prophet, in the sense that he saw then what others couldn’t see. It wasn’t that he saw into the
future, but he saw then what others could not yet see. He saw it in the faces of the students in his
literature classes at Oxford and Cambridge; he saw exactly what Huxley saw, though from a
different perspective. And he wrote about it his great essay, The Abolition of Man, which is from
the same little book as "Men without Chests." Listen to what Lewis wrote:

If any one age really attains by eugenics and scientific education the power to make its
descendents what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. Man's conquest
of nature, if the dream of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of
men (in the present that is) over billions upon billions of men born later. Human nature would be
the last part of nature to surrender to man, but then the battle would be won.

Lewis saw the abandonment of what he called the Tao, which is the idea of a transcendent body of
truth. He saw the abandonment of the Tao as the opening through which the "conditioners," as he
called them, would come and decide how we should live. This is something I talk about in How
Now Shall We Live: Is our future going to be decided by the conditioners, as Lewis thought? Or is
it going to be decided by us? And the cloning issue is such a pivotal one. It’s the one on which this
issue either succeeds or fails.

The Triumph of Rousseau?

The conditioners have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote
themselves to the task of deciding what humanity shall henceforth become. Good and bad applied
to them are mere words without content, for it is from them that the content of these words is
henceforward to be derived.

"These aren’t bad men," Lewis says; "they aren’t men at all." And he concludes: "Man’s final
conquest has proved to be the abolition of man." Lewis’s prophecy was that if you got rid of the
Tao — the transcendent truth, which I would call Judeo-Christian law and what some would call
"natural revelation" — if you get rid of that there would be no restraints. Eventually the
conditioners, through the progress of science, would decide what humanity should be. And that is
precisely the issue before us today! It is precisely why the biotech movement has got to be met by
sound bioethics, which are only made possible in my opinion by Christian reflection.

Christians have to bring that influence to bear in public policy in order to keep moral truth attached
to scientific progress. The question is this: Do we view human life as utilitarian, or does life have
intrinsic worth? The whole question of producing humans for body parts may sound appealing to
some, but it will lead inevitably to the abolition of man

It would be, in effect, the ultimate triumph of Rousseau, and the ultimate end of Western
civilization as we know it. So the stakes are very large. Over the next ten years I believe we will
see all this played out in public debates, and I look to you, the legislators who represent the moral
conscience of this nation, to be a bulwark against what would otherwise be an incredibly appealing
argument. For some will cry, "Save Uncle Joe from his Parkinson’s. All we need is a little more
stem cell research to do it!" But if we give in, the bioethical issues will soon be overwhelmed by
public passions.

While we have got to say yes to science, we must insist that the advances of science be always tied
to moral truth, lest we in fact witness the abolition of man.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Charles W. Colson is founder of Prison Fellowship and chairman of The Wilberforce Forum, the
academic research and public policy institute of Prison Fellowship in Washington, DC. This
address was the concluding lecture of the Bioethics Policy Seminar on Capitol Hill, sponsored by
The Wilberforce Forum, in cooperation with Faith & Law and the Ethics & Public Policy Center,
during five consecutive weeks, from March 23 to May 1, 2001.

Cloning