Moral update
I’m never quite sure how controversial I should make these blog entries. Obviously, I don’t want them to be bland and boring, but equally I don’t really want to offend any visitors to this web site. Not that my views are particularly controversial, being pretty much standard for a reasonably well-educated Englishman, i.e. liberal and secular.
But having recently seen the expletive-filled blog of another science writer, I think that perhaps I should cut loose a bit more. So I’m going to go wild; I’m going to go crazy; I’m going to write about religion.
The impetus for this uncharacteristic excursion into religion is my recent attendance at a one-day conference organised by the Progress Educational Trust, entitled Is the Embryo Sacrosanct? Multi-Faith Perspectives. As the name suggests, this conference discussed the ethics of embryo research, particularly embryonic stem cell research, and drew speakers from all the main world religions.
Now, as a general non-believer, one of the things that struck me at this conference is the way many religions try to determine their moral standpoint on modern scientific issues such as embryonic stem cells by consulting their holy books and sacred texts. The obvious problem with this approach is that these texts are usually hundreds, if not thousands, of years old and have nothing to say on these modern issues.
So what religious scholars tend to do is to consult the sections of the text that deal with related topics. For embryonic stem cells, this means the sections dealing with pregnancy, embryos, abortion and ensoulment (when the embryo attains a soul).
As there is only the most tenuous of relationships between the information in these sections and embryonic stem cells, scholars can often find support for whatever moral standpoint they want to take. Furthermore, as pointed out by the only secular speaker at the conference, John Harris, professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, a lot of the information in these texts just doesn’t square with our modern understanding of embryology.
But why should this be the case? If, as many religious followers believe, these texts are the literal word of an omniscient God, why did he produce texts that were so specific to the time when they first appeared? Surely He must have foreseen that lots of the information would become obsolete over time and that new ethical dilemmas would be constantly thrown up? Couldn’t He have produced something a bit more future-proof?
Now, it could be that perhaps He didn’t want mankind to be given an idea of what the future held in store? But in that case why doesn’t He release regular updates to these texts, to make them more relevant to today’s world and the kind of ethical dilemmas that people currently face. As well as bringing them up to date with regard to modern scientific knowledge.
Take the Bible, which is the only holy book I know anything about. Now, Christians today can only really take very general moral guidance from the Old and New Testaments. But, as far as I understand, when these Testaments first appeared they offered direct practical guidance about how people should live their lives, such as what kind of things they were allowed to eat and the inadvisability of taking out interest-bearing loans.
So if God issued regular updates, the Bible might now contain sections advising parents not to let young children watch more than two hours of television a day and promoting exercise. The bit about not taking out interest-bearing loans would also be underlined.
But God doesn’t regularly update the Bible or any other holy books and I, as a non-believer, have a pretty good idea why not.
