Human Cloning (Nov 28, 2001)

(Note from 2025: I wrote this as a missionary in Honduras back in 2001)

 

What does God think about a human clone?  How does He see him?  Is the clone a being that bears the image of God?  Does it have a sin nature and a spirit that requires salvation?  On the answers to these question hinges our response.

 

What is the purpose of human cloning?  It appears to me that there are no good reasons to do so.  It circumvents the usual means of producing a human being that God has established.  It fulfills the selfish desires of individuals to have “organ banks” of compatible tissue for future use.  It lets scientists feel like they are gods.

 

Let’s for a moment assume that cloned human beings are not human; they merely represent an off growth of the donor, a cell that has been induced to reproduce into an identical image, an identical twin, removed in time.  How shall we treat this being?  If it is to be saved for organ donation, we certainly don’t want to become attached to it!  But someone needs to care for this future donor. Do we need to raise it somewhere away from us, maybe on a farm, where it can be fed and kept healthy until the day it is needed?    Do we educate it?  Do we keep it as a pet?  Does it have rights?  Does it receive a birth certificate and citizenship?  Can it vote?  Can you insure it?  Will it be covered by your health plan?  

 

Maybe someone will vainly want an image of himself to raise as a child; to grant it a better life than they had and to somehow attain a sense of immortality in so doing; to see their own image in a better light.  Certainly in this case it would be desirable to grant the clone full human rights and protection!  If it were killed, it would be murder.

 

Can we have it both ways?

 

Let’s for a moment again think about what God may think.  To be safe, to avoid the problems of the past that we had thinking that people who were Jewish or black were not human, or that unborn babies were not human, let’s assume that indeed this cloned human is fully human in God’s eyes, just like two identical twins are both human with a unique soul and spirit; a unique personality and ability to learn; a unique future in which they deserve the right to seek life, liberty and happiness.  We must assume that this cloned being, since in reality it is created from and resembles a being that God created in His Image, has a sin nature and a spirit in need of redemption.  This cloned being then needs a family; needs to be loved and educated; needs to be granted full protection as a human being, and can not be treated simply as an animal waiting to be slaughtered for consumption by its owner.

 

Therefore, why bother?

 

It appears that human cloning is our modern Tower of Babel, in which man seeks to exert his will over the Will of God.  Man is exalting himself into the heavens in an attempt to make and sustain a name for himself.  Nothing about man has changed, only the time and place.

 

Dave Drozek, with

 

Thoughts from Honduras