Cloning: Is The Human Being Unique?

Posted by chris bouter, MA on: 2005-09-12 17:40:40

I am not discussing here whether cloning is evil. [I think it is a dangerous attempt to play God]. What I want to say here is that also cloned humans are unique like anybody else. We are not material machines without a ghost. God gave us the breath of life. Also it says in the Holy Bible that God is forming (present participle) our spirits within us (Zech. 12.1). {For the theologians among us: the human being is born neither in accordance with an Aristotelian Thomistic 'creationism' [the idea that God creates the spirit apart from the body and somehow 'puts' it into it (as it were through a 'backdoor'; Aristotle: thurathen)], nor according to a traducionism à la Tertullian and the Apollinarians [the idea that essentially in Adam all humans were contained]. There must be a very intertwined work between both the breath of life given to Adam and the genetic material on the one hand and the life of a human spirit as it develops over the course of a lifetime through the workings of God}. Cloning is not as unique as some probably think. God has been making clones from the beginning of time. For identical twins are more or less clones of each other. The only difference is that an artificial clone is younger than her twinsister, (who is also her 'mother'; except in the case of a male clone).

God forms our spirits within us in interaction with us. We are responsible on the one hand and God is gracious on the other. This holds also true for a cloned human. The Bible exhorts us 'to work out our salvation with fear and trembling; for (!) God is the One that is working both the willing and the working.' And elsewhere it says that although we do not know what we should pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with unfathomable sighings.

Scientists will never be able to clone a male from a female. The zygot (cell that makes us either male or female) that determines whether a person is female, consists of two x gametes (a gamete is a cell that comes from either the mother or the father to combine with the gamete from the other parent). A male zygot however consists of an x and a y gamete to become the unique diploid of malehood (read: male chromosome).

Women only carry double x chromosomes and men have chromosomes that consist both of the y and the x gametes. So that means that from women only can come women and from men (in combination with women) both men and women.

In the book of Job the question is asked whether anything clean can come from the unclean. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was just as fallen as anybody else. Yet the Holy Spirit could make a 'holy thing' and that male! {Never call Mary the mother of God. 'All generations will call me blessed' she said, but do not go beyond that. To call her the mother of God actually implies that she supplants God's unique divinity. It makes her more . . . Women would do good to think of the pious Jewish virgins that were wondering whether she or she would become the mother of the Messiah.}

This all makes the miracle of the virgin birth only an even greater wonder. No matter to what height mad scientists will climb, we follow Jesus Christ.

(see http://www.is888.info)

About the Author

born 11 June 1957 BAH from Acadia University MA from Dalhousie University working on my Ph.D. (see http://www.is888.info)