God Creates Adam, Sistine Chapel, The Vatican, Michelangelo, Fresco, 1508-11. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)
Source: Huffington Post
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As far as we know, there is no cure for death, no ingenious algorithm that can program the mysterious breath which at first gives life its form and then corrodes and withers it. It is in this breathing space between womb and tomb that we love, long and become human.
Advances on the frontiers of science are now testing these limits of the human condition. By raising anew foundational questions of origins and destiny, they are, paradoxically, resurrecting the religious imagination.
Who is to say medical science should not enter the atrium between life and death as agony sets in? Why not meddle in the other end of existence, quickening? Why not pursue purity and perfection, rewrite our genetic code and reach for immortality through cloning? We stole fire from the gods. Why not the breath of life?
Science has no knowledge of being. It can only report that we are a collection of cells. A bundle of nerves. An immune system.
That we can’t answer these questions with any convincing moral authority defines today’s epochal juncture. Liberal democracy, no less a consumer society wedded to the scientific worldview, cannot offer a defense on its own terms of the person or of human dignity when faced with such questions. There is only a utilitarian reply. “Health,” “longevity” or “saving a life” are the only standards. If that is what most people want, and that is what science can do, then what’s the problem?
Science has no knowledge of being. It can only report that we are a collection of cells. A bundle of nerves. An immune system. “Being,” “the person” and “human dignity” are concepts arising instead from the religious imagination. In Islam, our body is God’s trust. In the Judeo-Christian heritage the person is inviolable because he or she is a reflection of God’s grace, made in God’s image.
If we no longer believe in this link between the person and the sacred, as the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz has reflected, the bottom falls out of the values that underlay liberal democracy, leaving a lethal concoction of nihilism and technological prowess.
Increasingly, societies speeding toward the future are looking to traditional religion for moral and ethical guidance as they commit to their mutation in the new age of biology. Leon Kass, the “great books” scholar who headed the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, has returned to a study of the biblical book of “Genesis” for answers about the human condition in the 21st century. In his book, “The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis,“ he sees genetic engineering and dreams of cloning as our contemporary equivalent to the limitless hubris of the Tower of Babel, which, in the biblical account, God struck down.
Even that foremost European voice of secular reason, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, has arrived at a similar conclusion. In a conversation with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict, Habermas asked whether, “modern democracies of necessity must draw from moral — especially religious — sources that they cannot themselves produce.” He concludes that liberal democracies must leave a wide open space for religious expression and religious forms of life, particularly when confronting issues at the frontiers of science.
In a later book, “Time of Transitions,“ Habermas is even clearer, saying that the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy — the benchmarks of Western civilization. “To this day we have no other options,” he writes. “We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.” Habermas goes on to contest “unbridled subjectivity,” which he sees as clashing with, “what is really absolute; that is … the unconditional right of every creature to be respected in its bodiliness and recognized in its otherness as an ‘image of God.’”
Categories: Religion & Science, The Muslim Times