Psych Prof Advocates Human/Chimp Hybrids – But only to Offend Christians

WASHINGTON, July 28, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In an op ed piece in the LA Times, David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, says that reproductive facilities should work towards creating a race of human/chimpanzee hybrids, but, he admits, only because it would offend Christians.

Some geneticists have postulated that their distant evolutionary ancestors may have interbred with those of chimps, and Barash argues that this means there is no moral difference between a human being and a chimpanzee, or indeed, between a human being and a sea sponge.

The psychology professor looks forward to the day when IVF facilities will create human/animal hybrids. He reveals, however, that his motivation is not a pure interest in advancing science, but his hatred for “know-nothing anti-evolutionism,” and “religious fundamentalists,” who hold human life to be sacred.

Barash says he advocates interbreeding humans with animals not because it would be a good idea in itself, but because it would offend believers. “In these dark days of know-nothing anti-evolutionism,” he writes, “with religious fundamentalists occupying the White House, controlling Congress and attempting to distort the teaching of science in our schools, a powerful dose of biological reality would be healthy indeed.”

Barash says that creating animal/human hybrids would effectively quash the belief that “the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine and that we therefore stand outside nature.”

“Should geneticists and developmental biologists succeed once again in joining human and nonhuman animals in a viable organism,” Barash writes, “it would be difficult and perhaps impossible for the special pleaders to maintain the fallacy that Homo sapiens is uniquely disconnected from the rest of life.”

One of the ideological offshoots of Darwinsim is radical environmentalism, advocates of which hold that human beings are a kind of virus threatening the earth’s ecosystems. According to the pure materialist philosophy, the environmental threat is directly the fault of “a bogus ‘faith based’ worldview,” the “Judeo-Christian proclamation of radical discontinuity between people and the rest of ‘creation.’”

Such shrill anti-religious polemics are increasingly being challenged from within the scientific community as bigotry, however, and recent revelations have indicated that Barash’s pure Darwinian faith may be going the way of the dodo.

In a new book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, asks scientific skeptics to approach religious belief God with a more open mind. Collins is among a growing movement in the science world that asserts there is no necessary rift between real science and religious belief.

Collins is far from the stereotype religious “know-nothing” presented by anti-religious Darwinists. One of the world’s leading geneticists, he led the international Human Genome Project that mapped the 3.1 billion chemical base pairs in humanity's DNA. He now runs the government research foundation guiding work in the medical applications of this historic international project.

Collins attributed his rejection of the atheistic position to the writings of Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, the early 20th century English professor known and loved around the world for his ironclad logic in explaining Christian doctrines and debunking modern liberal atheism.

At a conference sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation, Collins said, “For a scientist, it's uncomfortable to admit there are questions that your scientific method isn't going to be able to address.”

Collins refutes the Darwinists’ out-of-hand rejection of religion. An article in the Washington Post quotes him saying scientists are “not supposed to decide something is true until [they’ve] looked at the data. And yet I had become an atheist without ever looking at the evidence whether God exists or not."

Collins decries both the anti-religious materialists who dominate his profession, and the Christian reaction that, he says, attempts to ignore hard scientific evidence. Both approaches, he said, are “profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary.”

Cloning is just plain wrong. For whatever purposes.

I know I've posted this fairly recently, but I figure a person can't hear this stuff too much:
Four aims of cloning:

a. the "reproductive" aim: to obtain individuals with a genetic patrimony identical to that of the donor of the nucleus;
b. the "therapeutic" aim: to obtain an embryo immune from mitochondrial diseases or chromosomopathies by cloning through nucleo-transfer or by transferring the nucleus from one oocyte to another and subsequent fertilization;
c. the "productive" aim: to obtain selected organs, tissues and cell lines. The product of cloning would always be an organism-individual (with or without encephalon) obtained by cloning through nucleo-transfer having the selected genetic patrimony. From this organism-individual it is thought to then obtain organs, tissues or cell lines of the required genetic quality;
d. an "experimental" aim": to simply leave the possibility of doing research open.

From Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Vitae:

6. WHAT JUDGMENT SHOULD BE MADE ON OTHER PROCEDURES OF MANIPULATING EMBRYOS CONNECTED WITH THE "TECHNIQUES OF HUMAN REPRODUCTION"? Techniques of fertilization in vitro can open the way to other forms of biological and genetic manipulation of human embryos, such as attempts or plans for fertilization between human and animal gametes and the gestation of human embryos in the uterus of animals, or the hypothesis or project of constructing artificial uteruses for the human embryo. These procedures are contrary to the human dignity proper to the embryo, and at the same time they are contrary to the right of every person to be conceived and to be born within marriage and from marriage.(32) Also, attempts or hypotheses for obtaining a human being without any connection with sexuality through "twin fission", cloning or parthenogenesis are to be considered contrary to the moral law, since they are in opposition to the dignity both of human procreation and of the conjugal union.

From the Pontifical Academy for Life, Reflections on Cloning:

Human cloning belongs to the eugenics project and is thus subject to all the ethical and juridical observations that have amply condemned it. As Hans Jonas has already written, it is "both in method the most despotic and in aim the most slavish form of genetic manipulation; its objective is not an arbitrary modification of the hereditary material but precisely its equally arbitrary fixationin contrast to the dominant strategy of nature" (cf. Hans Jonas, Cloniamo un uomo: dall'eugenetica all'ingegneria genetica, in Tecnica, medicina ed etica, Einaudi, Turin 1997, pp. 122-54, p. 136).
It represents a radical manipulation of the constitutive relationality and complementarity which is at the origin of human procreation in both its biological and strictly personal aspects. It tends to make bisexuality a purely functional left-over, given that an ovum must be used without its nucleus in order to make roomfor the clone-embryo and requires, for now, a female womb so that its development may be brought to term. This is how all the experimental procedures in zootechny are being conducted, thus changing the specific meaning of human reproduction.
In this vision we find the logic of industrial production: market research must be explored and promoted, experimentation refined, ever newer models produced.
Women are radically exploited and reduced to a few of their purely biological functions (providing ova and womb) and research looks to the possibility of constructing artificial wombs, the last step to fabricating human beings in the laboratory.
In the cloning process the basic relationships of the human person are perverted: filiation, consanguinity, kinship, parenthood. A woman can be the twin sister of her mother, lack a biological father and be the daughter of her grandfather. In vitro fertilization has already led to the confusion of parentage, but cloning will mean the radical rupture of these bonds.
As in every artificial activity, what occurs in nature is "mimicked" and "imitated", but only at the price of ignoring how man surpasses his biological component, which moreover is reduced to those forms of reproduction that have characterized only the biologically simplest and least evolved organisms.
The idea is fostered that some individuals can have total dominion over the existence of others, to the point of programming their biological identity—selected according to arbitrary or purely utilitarian criteria—which, although not exhausting man's personal identity, which is characterized by the spirit, is a constitutive part of it. This selective concept of man will have, among other things, a heavy cultural fallout beyond the—numerically limited—practice of cloning, since there will be a growing conviction that the value of man and woman does not depend on their personal identity but only on those biological qualities that can be appraised and therefore selected.
Human cloning must also be judged negative with regard to the dignity of the person cloned, who enters the world by virtue of being the "copy" (even if only a biological copy) of another being: this practice paves the way to the clone's radical suffering, for his psychic identity is jeopardized by the real or even by the merely virtual presence of his "other". Nor can we suppose that a conspiracy of silence will prevail, a conspiracy which, as Jonas already noted, would be impossible and equally immoral: since the "clone" was produced because he resembles someone who was "worthwhile" cloning, he will be the object of no less fateful expectations and attention, which will constitute a true and proper attack on his personal subjectivity.
If the human cloning project intends to stop "before" implantation in the womb, trying to avoid at least some of the consequences we have just indicated, it appears equally unjust from the moral standpoint.
A prohibition of cloning which would be limited to preventing the birth of a cloned child, but which would still permit the cloning of an embryo-foetus, would involve experimentation on embryos and foetuses and would require their suppression before birth—a cruel, exploitative way of treating human beings.
In any case, such experimentation is immoral because it involves the arbitrary use of the human body (by now decidedly regarded as a machine composed of parts) as a mere research tool. The human body is an integral part of every individual's dignity and personal identity, and it is not permissible to use women as a source of ova for conducting cloning experiments.
It is immoral because even in the case of a clone, we are in the presence of a "man", although in the embryonic stage.
All the moral reasons which led to the condemnation of in vitrofertilization as such and to the radical censure of in vitro fertilization for merely experimental purposes must also be applied to human cloning.
The "human cloning" project represents the terrible aberration to which value-free science is driven and is a sign of the profound malaise of our civilization, which looks to science, technology and the "quality of life" as surrogates for the meaning of life and its salvation.
The proclamation of the "death of God", in the vain hope of a "superman", produces an unmistakable result: the "death of man". It cannot be forgotten that the denial of man's creaturely status, far from exalting human freedom, in fact creates new forms of slavery, discrimination and profound suffering. Cloning risks being the tragic parody of God's omnipotence. Man, to whom God has entrusted the created world, giving him freedom and intelligence, finds no limits to his action dictated solely by practical impossibility: he himself must learn how to set these limits by discerning good and evil. Once again man is asked to choose: it is his responsibility to decide whether to transform technology into a tool of liberation or to become its slave by introducing new forms of violence and suffering.
The difference should again be pointed out between the conception of life as a gift of love and the view of the human being as an industrial product.
Halting the human cloning project is a moral duty which must also be translated into cultural, social and legislative terms. The progress of scientific research is not the same as the rise of scientistic despotism, which today seems to be replacing the old ideologies. In a democratic, pluralistic system, the first guarantee of each individual's freedom is established by unconditionally respecting human dignity at every phase of life, regardless of the intellectual or physical abilities one possesses or lacks. In human cloning the necessary condition for any society begins to collapse: that of treating man always and everywhere as an end, as a value, and never as a mere means or simple object.

From Genesis:

Gen 2:15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
Gen 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;
Gen 2:17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

Gen 3:5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
Gen 3:6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.
Gen 3:7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked...

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