Suppose technology developed to the point where human beings could be efficiently grown in artificial, easily accessible, test-tube wombs, without the need of sexual intercourse or pregnancy. There would be many advantages to this. Future generations could be carefully grown under ideal conditions, and only the healthiest test-tube humans, and only as many as needed, and only those with desirable qualities (whatever that might be), would ever be harvested. No more unwanted pregnancies or inept or unprepared parents who abuse or neglect their biological children. No more inequalities between males and females due to pregnancy. If we had the technology to produce new humans in this way, there would clearly be many advantages to it.
But supposing we could do all this, and be assured of its positive results, and had only the best intentions to motivate us, would it be right? For some the answer is obviously yes—think of the human suffering that could be avoided! They might even yearn for such a world. For others it is just as obviously no, and they are horrified at the very prospect. How could thinking human beings come to such different conclusions about something so fundamental? Is moral reasoning that slippery, that unreliable? Not really. This is not so much a failure of moral reasoning as it is the result of divergent views of reality, not so much a question of what is right and what is wrong, but rather a deeper question, the question of what a human being is.
If a human being is merely the product of unguided biological evolution, then it is hard to see what the moral objection to any of this would be. To be sure, people might not want to give up their old ways, and might resist this kind of radical change; but not wanting to give up your old ways is not really a moral objection. You might not want to give them up, but maybe you should, for the sake of progress. And if you think about it, all we would really be doing here is taking unguided biological evolution, which produced us in the first place, to the next step. Rather than relying on further random acts to determine how we evolve from here, we’d be using our evolutionarily produced intelligence to guide our future evolution. What could be wrong with that? In principle, nothing. Not, that is, if a human being is merely the product of unguided biological evolution.
But if a human being is the special creation of God, created in His image and sacred to Him—if that’s what a human being is, and not the product of unguided evolution—then the brave new world I described above is not right at all, and cannot be right, no matter what benefits it promises. Quite the contrary, it’s a monstrous and dehumanizing world. If a human being is a special creation of God and sacred to Him, then human life does not belong to humans, but to God. We are morally constrained from doing such things because we are not our own, whatever the promised benefits of reproductive technology.
I don’t think people are less moral than they used to be, nor have they lost the capacity to engage in moral reasoning. What we have lost is a common understanding of reality, including the nature of our own being. As a culture, the West no longer agrees about what a human being is.
What I mean is this. When a naturalist speaks of a “human being”, they are speaking of a purely biological organism, produced entirely by natural processes, different from a fish or a cat only in degree, not in kind. But when a Christian speaks of a human being, he speaks of an embodied soul, something created by God and of immense value to Him. Biological similarities notwithstanding, an embodied soul is not at all like a cat! So even if they did agree about the potential benefits artificial wombs and the like might offer, they absolutely would not agree about the rightness of doing such a thing. It’s not that the naturalist is incapable of moral reasoning, it’s that the naturalist and the Christian are talking about different things. The Christian might breed cats, and sterilize them, too. But we don’t do this with people. A cat is a biological organism, a person is an embodied soul. The decisive issue is not the rules governing human reproduction, but rather, what a human being is.
Morals are not arbitrary rules. They are born of an underlying reality and inseparable from it. Whether you think people could be bred in test tubes or not depends first on what you think a human being is. The same is the case with elective abortion, whether that’s okay or not, or euthanasia, or suicide. These things are morally wrong for a Christian not merely because of some rule forbidding them, but because of what we know a human being to be. Moral rules are a fine thing, and sound moral reasoning is essential, but first we must know what reality is and agree what reality we are talking about!
James D. Burns
Pastor, First Lutheran Church (LC-MS)
Benton, Arkansas
First Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) 