The Honor Of God

From Mercator is a disturbing article about Nature Magazine:

Dignified Arguments

By Michael Cook

The human embryo is very small, far smaller than the head of a pin. It cannot feel. It cannot think. It has no autonomous existence. And products derived from it are potentially both profit-making and wonder-working. No wonder scientists in the United States and Britain are exasperated by government restrictions. They see no ethical problem whatsoever with dicing embryos up on a laboratory bench.

But anyone who doubts the immense moral seriousness of the debate over the use of human embryos in stem cell research need only read a recent issue of Nature. Nature is the world’s leading scientific journal and its crisp editorials express the views of the world scientific establishment. For years it has been a fervent supporter of therapeutic cloning and embryo research, a harsh critic of President Bush’s restrictive stem cell policy and a cheerleader for the Labour government’s push to make the UK the world’s stem cell capital.

So it was dismaying to discover that Nature has discarded the concept of “human dignity” as unworthy of mature, intelligent argument. According to an editorial published earlier this month, it is a contradictory, “notoriously subjective” and “slippery” concept. In four glib paragraphs, it jettisons 2,500 years of Western civilisation, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the constitutions of numerous countries.

The trigger for this was the ludicrous news that Swiss scientists cannot experiment on chimpanzees because it is offensive to their dignity. According to their new constitution, the Swiss are required to take into account “the dignity of creation”. This is being interpreted so broadly that research on animals and even on plants is at risk. This was certainly enough to question the sanity of Swiss bureaucrats.

However, underlying Nature’s rejection of human dignity is something else. Human dignity is a mainstay of arguments against research on embryos. As it is commonly understood, human dignity is indivisible. You cannot affirm that a black African is a human being and then pass laws to make him a slave. You cannot affirm that the elderly are fully human and pass laws to euthanase everyone over 85.

The problem for stem cell scientists and their boosters, is that the embryo is clearly human. It has the full human genome and barring any mishaps, it will someday become successively a foetus, a baby, a child, and an adult. It is a human being in an embryonic stage of development. In the words of Diana Schaub, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, “It is recognizably one of us — recognizable not to the naked eye, but to the scientifically trained eye.”

So what has the scientifically trained eye of Nature done? It has followed Groucho Marx’s precept: “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.” Since human dignity leads inescapably to the conclusion that embryo experimentation is inadmissable, it has ditched human dignity. “Dignity as a concept cannot be a director of moral judgement,” it insists.

What is cringingly embarrassing about this argument is that it was cribbed from a controversial article by the Harvard neuroscientist Stephen Pinker in The New Republic. Nature has taken seriously Pinker’s bad-tempered and abusive attack on a report from the President’s Council on Bioethics. This strongly supported human dignity against a growing number of bioethicists and scientists who claim that it is too squishy to serve as a rationale for bioethical decisions. “[W]hat it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare,” sneered Pinker. “For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing.”

What was Pinker’s alternative to human dignity? The harder-edged concept of “autonomy”, or a person’s capacity for self-determination. This, he says, is safeguard enough for all the elements of what we normally regard as human dignity. “So, even when breaches of dignity lead to an identifiable harm, it’s ultimately autonomy and respect for persons that gives us the grounds for condemning it.”

But has the editor of Nature never considered the consequences which accompany Pinker’s theory? Persons in permanent vegetative states are not autonomous; the unconscious elderly are not autonomous. What will be their fate if scientists, doctors and hospitals reject human dignity? Embryos are not autonomous either. Hence, they need only be treated only with whatever degree of respect that a stem cell scientist deems appropriate. Which is not much: the privilege of being diced up to further his quest for a Nobel Prize.

Autonomy is a very dangerous foundation for ethics. As Peter Singer argues in his influential book Practical Ethics (don’t tell me that the editors of Nature are unfamiliar with it!), “a newborn baby is not an autonomous being, capable of making choices, and so to kill a newborn baby cannot violate the principle of respect for autonomy”.

Blinded by its obsession with justifying embryo research, Nature cannot see another obvious consequence of embracing autonomy. This helpfully shunts non-autonomous embryos into Petri dishes. But it also opens wide the cages of laboratory animals. Chimpanzees, monkeys, pigs and dogs all have more autonomy than embryos, newborn babies and comatose patients. Therefore, argue animal rights activists, they should not be used as fodder for scientists’ wicked experiments. There are few causes which Nature supports with more vigour than animal experimentation – but embracing autonomy as the foundation of ethics undermines their campaign.

Pinker describes “human dignity” as “squishy” and hard to define. Of course he does. Sniffing at lack of logical rigour is the opening gambit in most academic debates in the humanities. In fact, human dignity can easily be defended, as the excellent essays in the report from the President’s Council on Bioethics readily demonstrate. In any case, it is naïve to assume that “autonomy” is beyond criticism as “squishy”. In a recent issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics, for instance, a bioethicist complains that “The notion of personal autonomy is notoriously blurry and is used in many different ways.”

It’s hard to understand how the world’s leading science journal could ever have taken Pinker’s hissy-fit seriously. The consequences of rejecting centuries of human dignity and replacing it with a self-serving, gimcrack theory are momentous. Embryos may be small but upon them rests our dignity, too.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

We are well aware that it is not easy suddenly to change a mind possessed by ignorance, we intend to add a few things, for the sake of persuading those who love the truth, knowing that it is possible to put ignorance to flight by presenting the truth.

— St Justin the Martyr

The writings of St. Irenaeus entitle him to a high place among the fathers of the Church, for they not only laid the foundations of Christian theology but, by exposing and refuting the errors of the gnostics, they delivered the Catholic Faith from the real danger of the doctrines of those heretics.

He was probably born about the year 125, in one of those maritime provinces of Asia Minor where the memory of the apostles was still cherished and where Christians were numerous. He was most influenced by St. Polycarp who had known the apostles or their immediate disciples

Many Asian priests and missionaries brought the gospel to the pagan Gauls and founded a local church. To this church of Lyon, Irenaeus came to serve as a priest under its first bishop, St. Pothinus, an oriental like himself. In the year 177, Irenaeus was sent to Rome. This mission explains how it was that he was not called upon to share in the martyrdom of St Pothinus during the terrible persecution in Lyons. When he returned to Lyons it was to occupy the vacant bishopric. By this time, the persecution was over. It was the spread of gnosticism in Gaul, and the ravages it was making among the Christians of his diocese, that inspired him to undertake the task of exposing its errors. He produced a treatise in five books in which he sets forth fully the inner doctrines of the various sects, and afterwards contrasts them with the teaching of the Apostles and the text of the Holy Scripture. His work, written in Greek but quickly translated to Latin, was widely circulated and succeeded in dealing a death-blow to gnosticism. At any rate, from that time onwards, it ceased to offer a serious menace to the Catholic faith.

The date of death of St. Irenaeus is not known, but it is believed to be in the year 202. The bodily remains of St. Irenaeus were buried in a crypt under the altar of what was then called the church of St. John, but was later known by the name of St. Irenaeus himself. This tomb or shrine was destroyed by the Calvinists in 1562, and all trace of his relics seems to have perished.

Saint Irenaeus (c. 130-202)

http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=291

From Jordan J. Ballor: 

Earlier this month “Red Letter Christian” Tony Campolo wrote a blog post for Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics blog that criticized the American government for not properly taking into account the effect its foreign policy has on fulfilling the Great Commission.

Here’s a bit concerning the Iraq war:

It doesn’t take much for Red Letter Christians to recognize that the hostilities between Muslims and Christians have increased greatly as of late because of certain geopolitical events—particularly as we consider what has been happening in the Holy Land and the consequences of a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Mark Tooley of IRD does a thorough job fisking all of the faulty assumptions and oversights in Campolo’s piece.

One of the things Campolo is right about is the victimization of Christians at the hands of militant Muslims in Iraq. He writes,

For the first time in a thousand years, churches in Baghdad are being burned down. The Coptic bishop of Iraq was kidnapped and later found dead. Christians, facing persecution, have fled Iraq by the tens of thousands, so that a Christian community that once numbered more than 1.3 million is now down to 600,000.

The problem is that Campolo is acting as if the proximate cause of Muslim violence against Iraqi Christians is anger at American occupation. As Tooley notes, in the Iraq conflict as in so many other genuine Muslim-Christian conflicts around the world, Campolo fails to see the belligerent militancy of Muslim extremism. Campolo, among others, “can never admit that radical Islam itself is innately violent and spiteful, and would remain so, even if the United States were to curl up and die a quiet death.”

A much more plausible explanation for the suffering of the Iraqi church is that the protections of minority groups, including Sunnis and Christians, that were in place under Saddam Hussein disappeared during and after the invasion, and have not yet been adequately reinstated. As Robin Harris writes, “With other (still smaller) religious minorities, such as Yazidis and Mandaeans, Iraq’s Christians are suffering sustained persecution. While constituting less than 4 percent of the population of Iraq, Christians constitute 40 percent of the refugees leaving the country. Most of these have found refuge in Syria and Jordan, where they are living in utterly degrading conditions.”

The plight of Iraqi Christians in post-invasion Iraq is an important reminder that all government actions, whether domestic or international, have unintended consequences. Again, Robin Harris:

Unfortunately, until now there has been a conspiracy of near-silence. Some in the U.S. administration have been unwilling to have public attention drawn to the problem, for fear it would undermine support for the surge strategy. Other countries — with the notable exception of Germany — do not wish to do so either, for fear that they will be expected to take in more refugees. (Britain has a particularly shameful record in this respect). Meanwhile, diplomatic circles have a politically correct repugnance against any initiative directed towards helping a particular religious group — especially, of course, a Christian one. At an international level, only the pope has called for urgent action to avert the tragedy.

The best thing the U.S. government can do for Christians in Iraq is not to beat a hasty retreat and withdraw, as so many “Red Letter Christians” desire, but rather to acknowledge the unintended consequences of its foreign policy, including the increased persecution of Iraqi Christians. This also means taking responsibility for those unintended consequences. As so many have observed regarding the invasion of Iraq, once you decide to invade a sovereign nation, you take on all kinds of responsibilities for what happens afterwards. This applies in no small measure to the suffering of minority groups, including especially the Christian church in Iraq.

http://blog.acton.org/authors/2-Jordan-J-Ballor

The Telegraph’s Chris Booker thanks the Irish for calling the bluff on one of the most shameless confidence tricks in political history this past week:

Seven years ago, Europe’s leaders decided that, as the consummation of their great “project”, they would draw up a Constitution for Europe. After extending its powers for nearly 50 years, often by subterfuge and deception, the European Union could emerge in its true light on the world stage, as an all-powerful, supranational government.Under the Laeken Declaration of 2001, full of references to “democracy” and the need to bring “Europe closer to its people”, they set up a convention which spent 18 months drafting the constitution, tightly controlled at every point by its president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. advertisement

For 18 months more they fine-tuned its details until it was ready to be ratified, by compliant national parliaments or by the referendums which various governments had been reluctantly forced to concede.

Then came that shocking moment in 2005 when the constitution was thrown out by the voters of France and Holland. The EU’s leaders were stunned, and bemused as to what to do next.

Then, last summer, they came up with a breathtakingly bold plan. They would rearrange the contents of the constitution in a way that made it virtually incomprehensible, omit the provocative references to a constitution, and railroad it through their parliaments without risking any more referendums - except for the only country, Ireland, whose constitution made one unavoidable. …

The Catholic members of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and the Office of International Justice and Peace of the USCCB have jointly produced a Catholic study guide on torture in PDF format called Torture is a moral issue. [Via Christopher at Catholics in the Public Square]

The reason why our times are so irreligious is on account of the unchristian families. Where the wrong was, there must be the remedy. All the authority of Church and State is useless if the family does not co-operate.

— St John Vianney