Dear Editor,
The caption of Mr. Paul Kokoski’s latest letter, “There must be moral limits to science” (08.02.21) is the only thing in it that I agree with. Most scientists conduct their work within a self-imposed morality and ethics that rarely offends social sensibilities.
There is no need to preach morality and ethics to them. The few who cross the limits are soon denuded by scientific methods and scientific bodies for the frauds and fiends they are. This is why there is a thing called peer review in science.
The question is, though, who determines moral limits? Should moral limits be defined solely by a non-democratic cabal of doddering old ecclesiastical celibates who are guided by the mores of ancient peoples with an obsolete understanding of the workings of the natural world? As I said in my previous letter, “Governments across the world have to sit down and thrash out appropriate genetic improvement legislation.” That’s commonsense. I thoroughly disagree with Mr. Kokoski’s notion that suffering is a “necessary part of our mortal condition” and that the voluntary acceptance of suffering has some expiatory value. If there are tools and techniques that can alleviate human suffering, by all means, let’s use them. We can mature and bear better fruits with healthy bodies and healthy minds. There is absolutely no need for us to die as osteoporotic, Alzheimic senile old goats if science can help us to cross the final threshold with our bodies, brains and humanity fully intact.
Those who choose to endure suffering to pay for their sins are free to do so. Those who believe that their sins are washed away by other means and they don’t need to suffer should have full and undeniable access to all that science can offer. Why should I suffer because of a morality defined by the aforementioned cabal?
Were we to have remained bounded by the “stark reality of our conditions as human and spiritual beings,” we would have stayed in our caves or trees, instead of venturing into the air, onto and under the sea, into outer space and into the human body to repair damaged parts. Bishop Wright, father of Orville and Wilbur, once told his congregation that God reserved flight for angels and birds.
His sons invented and flew the first controlled, powered heavier-than-air machine. Indeed, improving on our “stark reality” has been the defining mark of our species ever since we became Homo sapiens, thinking man.
If in vitro fertilization is evil, then why did the Good Lord twice bypass his own “natural law which requires life to be generated naturally as a result of a human act between a man and a woman?” Mary, the Immaculate Conception, was unmarried when she conceived Yeshua, the Virgin Conception. Was the Good Lord breaking his own moral code? The Hebrew author-editors of Genesis tell us that the Good Lord made man in his own image, after his own likeness. The author-editors of John reported that Yeshua said that we shall do greater works than he did. Now that the Good Lord is no longer in the business of impregnating virgins, and I doubt he is still in the business of shutting up wombs, any help that humans in God’s image and likeness can give to a natural process gone awry should surely be appreciated. “I must be about my Father’s business.”Mr. Kokoski evinces a simplistic miscorrelation that science is linked with destructiveness. This miscorrelation is as true as the fact that kitchen knives, rolling pins, cutlasses, paling staves, electrical cords, broomsticks, bottles, belts, fertilizers, diesel, box-cutters, aeroplanes and other utilitarian objects have sometimes been linked with destructiveness. It does not mean that utilitarian items are destructive.
Science is just another utilitarian item and its tools and techniques are likewise morally and ethically neutral. It is the wrong use to which non-scientists, such as Adolf Hitler, put them that is evil.
Is water evil because it drowns so many persons every year? Is food evil because it chokes so many to death annually? Is fire evil because it burns so many daily? Is electricity evil because it electrocutes so many? Is nuclear power evil because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is religion evil because people have been killed in the name of religion?
Science and scientists have never gone to war as non-science and non-scientists have so frequently done. If we are ever destroyed unnaturally, it will not be due to science, but as the direct result of the irrationalities and nonsense of non-science.
Yours faithfully,
M. Xiu Quan-Balgobind-Hackett
