Human Dignity and Bioethics

396 | David Gelernter
religious idea, even if God never comes up. In sum, many bioethicists
would rather go on using the term while forgetting the definition—
why rent a car when you can borrow one?—all the while assuring us
that man is merely one species among many and hence entitled to
nothing special.
I’ve claimed that human sanctity is grounded in the idea of God’s
having created man in His image, and I’ve referred to this as a “religious”
argument. But I don’t really mean it—don’t mean religion
in a general sense; I mean Biblical religion. (I include Islam insofar
as it acknowledges the Bible’s truth and has in principle many close
connections to Judaism.) Indeed, man’s being created in the image
of God is the basic, defining characteristic of Biblical as opposed to
other religions; everything else flows from this seminal assertion in
Genesis. This becomes clear when we compare the revolutionary assertion
in Genesis to the pagan view it replaced. Pagans believed that
the gods were made in man’s image. (Of course I don’t want to call
the great religions of the east “pagan”; but from certain angles they
resemble pagan more than Biblical religion, and particularly in this
respect.) What was the meaning and force of Judaism’s startling assertion
that man had been made in God’s image instead of vice versa?
If man is made in God’s image, man’s goal must be not to accept
his animal nature but to transcend it; not to “blend into” nature or
“become one with” nature or with the universe but to raise himself
above nature; not to be himself but to be better than himself. Hence
he must struggle toward goodness and sanctity. He can never reach
that goal, not entirely, any more than he can become the deity he (in
some sense) resembles, any more than Moses (in the most powerful
metaphor in the Bible) was able to reach the Promised Land. But he
must try.
This seems like a lot of religious doctrine to swallow. Surely such
things could only be germane to devout Jews and Christians (and
perhaps to Muslims). But when and if we accept (explicitly or otherwise)
the Ten Commandments and the Holiness Code as the basis of
our ethics, this is the God and the story we implicitly accept.
“Human sanctity” has other properties that make it useful in
bioethics—at least to some bioethicists. The hardest bioethical problems
often involve the creation of human life: for example, abortion,
cloning, designer babies, and other related topics. Some thinkers are