Human Dignity and Bioethics

80 | Robert P. Kraynak
or advancing knowledge. The pride of science should be tempered by
the recognition that science and reason will never be able to understand
fully the most important things about the universe and man—
for example, why we get old and die or why our body cells wear out
or why cell replacement diminishes; these are biological questions
in one sense and in other sense spiritual questions about why our
bodies are mortal and finite. Because science can deal only with one
dimension of this issue, we should moderate the ambitions of science
and accept the fact that it will not be able to produce the “miracle” of
unending life or the knowledge of aging and death that it promises.
(2) Second, genetic engineering in particular will not be able to
succeed in changing or perfecting human nature. Genetic engineering
is part of the utopian dream of the modern scientific and political
project to remake man according to blueprints of perfect rationality
and perfect justice. This project assumes the dualism of man as a
machine for mastery and as master of the machine; but this is a false
dualism. Scientists may learn how to connect certain genes with certain
traits like diseases or abnormal aggression. But they will never
develop an exact science that connects genes with all the traits that
make up a human being. The basis of the personality is the human
soul, and the soul cannot be reduced to the body or the brain because
the soul will always be mysterious. We may find links between
genes and aspects of traits like depression, aggression, sexual identity,
and self-esteem. But what about talents like musical ability, higher
intellectual pursuits, artistic creativity, spiritual awareness of mortality
and immortality? The notion that these are explicable in terms of
genes and traits is a false pretense of scientific materialism. The mysteries
of the human soul will never be reducible to the 30,000 genes
or the 3 billion nucleotides of the human genome.
(3) Third, since human dignity is based on the mystery of the
human soul, we do not have to fear human cloning as much as some
critics suggest, 22 even though it is a bad idea, because it will probably
produce nothing more than unnecessary suffering in its defective
human products. Even if we could clone Charles De Gaulle and
put him in a general’s uniform, he still would not be Charles De
Gaulle—whose personality and character are partly a product of his
genes but are also a product of his rational and divine soul, not to
mention his historical times and national culture. The cloned version