I found this article on the Human Cloning Foundation bulletin board. I think it shows an interesting perspective on the entire debate about the debate between religionists and scientists about when human life begins and what causes it to begin and end.
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Vitalism and the "soul"
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Posted by: libfemme ®
12/18/2003, 01:48:37
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The rash of bills to ban cloning is evidence that a sizeable portion of the public still believes in vitalism. Vitalism is an ancient medical philosophy that was discredited and abandoned by serious scientists by the early 19th century. Vitalism only works if one does not have a microscope, or keen observation.
Vitalism is the doctrine that life processes contain a nonmaterial vital principle that cannot be explained entirely as physical and chemical phenomena. Life was said to possess a “vital spark” that gave animation to lifeless matter. Vitalism held that organic chemistry was materially different from inorganic chemistry and that organic compounds could not be produced by anything by living etities. This was proved wrong when Wöhler synthesized urea, an organic compound, in the laboratory, something that vitalism said was impossible to do!
Vitalism, or the spark of life, was also heavily identified with the soul. When the soul was said to be present, an organism was alive. When the soul departed, the organism was said to die. Therefore it was easy to identify and define the soul before the advent of the microscope. The soul was life.
However, by the early 19th century, biologists acknowledged that every living entity was made up, at the microscopic level, of cells. Cells, unlike individuals, were never “born”. Instead they arose from a preexisting cell by dividing from it. Observations of cells proved that life did not spring from non-life, that inert matter was not ‘animated’ by a sudden spark of life. The classic experiment disproving vitalism occurred in 1859 at the French Academy of Sciences. Louis Pasteur demonstrated before the academy that if meat broth was boiled, so that the microbes living in it were killed, no new microbes arose from the dead ones. This was the classic proof that life did not spontaneous generate.
Although biologists abandoned the doctrine of spontaneous generation after Pasteur’s experiment it would appear that Religious Doctrinaires did not. The phase “life begins a conception” is a distinctly vitalist statement. Biologists have clearly demonstrated that life does not begin with conception, because life is in existence before conception takes place. A new organism arises from the union of a living sperm and a living egg. The embryo does not suddenly ‘come alive’ at some moment during conception.
Even asking the question when “life” begins is pointless from a scientific point of view. Life, for scientists, began 4.5 billion years ago and has never stopped! It is not generated anew every time a new organism is conceived. Life is something that exists in the constituent parts before conception and carries over after it.
But this evidence has given some Christians in a new dilemma. If life does not have a clear beginning point then how does one know when the soul enters the body? Actually this problem became a crisis for some Christians decades ago. Since human tissue can now be kept living after the brain as an organ dies, or when an individual is comtatose, in fact after an individual dies his organ can be transplanted into another organism and the organ is clearly kept alive, just what then is the soul? When does it leave the body? When does it enter the body? And how do we know what the soul is, if tissue can be keep living while an individual ceases to be an individual? The problem exists as a problem only for those Christians who seem detemined to define the soul in purely physical terms.
If the soul is defined only as the ‘spark’ that gives life then, yes, modern cell theory presents a problem for the theory of the soul. If the soul, however, is more than what gives life, but is an immaterial aspect of humanness and connection to God, then the lack of physical indicaton of the soul does not present a problem. The decision is up to the Christian to determine how he views the soul.
However, for many Christians it appears that if they can’t find physical evidence for the soul, if they can’t prove that a soul enters a living individual at some specific point in time then somehow, they fear, that proves there is no soul at all! Mind you, it is not science that is claiming there is no soul. It is religion that fears that there might not be one!
It is a crisis within in religion based upon its adherents own narrow definitions and rules about soul, not any attack or argument coming form the field of science. Religion is beginning to doubt itself. Science is not disproving religion!
Religion has set itself up for failure. By declaring that they must win this battle, or the soul is disproved, they have set up the rules of the game so that they are certain to lose. They would be far better off if they left the definition of the soul to the realm of the undefinable and unknowable. But demanding to know the moment when the soul enters, and how it enters the individual, they have created their own means of failure.
Cloning does not disprove the existence of the soul nor of God. Yet religion seems determined to claim that it does. Religion seems convinced that if cloning succeeds then the existence of God has been dealt a terrible blow. No other explanation for the hysteria in which christians greet the news of cloning success makes sense. It is religious people who are beginning to doubt their faith because of cloning’s success, it is not cloning that is claiming any victory over religion.
Religious people have accepted half of one philosophy and half of another. They acknowledge science’s claim that the cell exists but sill hold on to vitalisms claim that life arises from non-life. Believing in the microscopic cell, but still holding on to vitalism, is incompatible and contradictory. Applying the theories of ‘vitalism’ at the cell level leads to self-contradiction and nonsense. Claiming that an embryo is the moral equivalent of a fully formed individual is nonsense. Equating a potential with actua is nonsense. Because potential exists everywhere. If potential life is the same as existing life, then every rock, every atom can be said to be “potential”. It blurs the distinction between life and non-life. If makes a mockery about of the sanctity of life. If potential life is the same thing as an actual life then every thing is life and life no longer has a special meaning.
It is blind application of disproven theories that is destroying the credibility of Christians as believers in the specialness of “life”. It is religions dogma that is threatening the dignity of humanness, not science.
