Human Dignity and Bioethics

The Mystery of the Human Soul | 81
of Charles De Gaulle created in the year 2007 and put in a general’s
uniform may look like De Gaulle, but he will not have De Gaulle’s
soul and may just as well be content flipping hamburgers in uniform
rather than acting as the heroic savior of France.
(4) Fourth, cloning is still a violation of human dignity because it
violates the God-given natural methods of procreation through malefemale
reproduction, which is part of the teaching of Genesis about
human beings made in the image and likeness of God. Sexual reproduction
is partly a natural biological process, but it is also a divine mystery
because the human species could have been made to reproduce by
asexual reproduction or by way of three sexes rather than male-female
procreation. Biotechnology threatens the natural order of things because
it seems to imply that everything can be reinvented by science
and the human will—by man as master of the machine. But the uncertainty
of tampering with God’s creation should be reinforced by a
cautionary sense of awe before the mystery of life and procreation.
(5) Fifth, the techniques of the biotechnical revolution that are
the most justifiable are those that most modestly follow the course
of nature and respect the mysterious unity of man as body and soul.
Thus, the procedures of in vitro fertilization that essentially replicate
the natural processes in couples who cannot conceive on their
own are the most defensible in terms of respecting human dignity.
Specifically, fertilizing the egg and sperm of married couples outside
the womb and then replacing the embryo in the mother’s womb are
corrections of defects in accordance with nature’s ways, not a willful
effort to conquer and remake nature. Likewise, drug therapies
that respect the limitations of knowledge regarding the physiology
of moods and behavior are justifiable if they do not willfully assume,
for example, that depression or aggression are merely physical and
chemical rather than possibly spiritual maladies. Healing the body
and mind by healing the soul has always been practiced, more or
less successfully, and it can offer limited hopes in relieving a certain
amount of human suffering without expecting science to master the
human mind. In sum, we can accept certain features of the biotechnical
revolution that acknowledge the partial truths of modern science,
but they must be tempered by the awareness of the whole truth
about man as the mysterious unity of body, rational soul, and an
image of the divine eternity.