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Humanity will spend much of the 21st century attempting to speak that language. A fast-developing biotech vocabulary—genetic therapy, stem cells, reproductive cloning, and so on—strains the ability of even the most thoughtful to keep up. Human life may soon be changed dramatically, and Christians must participate in the international conversation about these changes before they become irreversible.

The Christian faith has the potential to serve not just the church but the world by penetrating the fog of current events to discern their deeper meaning—and to offer clear-headed analysis amid growing confusion.

Market forces. The sprawling biotech industry, already doing $80 billion in business in the United States alone, would not be awash in money were there not a demand for its innovations. These products and services include stem cells, gene therapies and enhancements, and, one day, perhaps soon, clones. Biotech firms promise what people want—health, pain relief, reproduction, longevity, success.

Thus far they do so with little public regulation or control, one of the most troubling features of our new era—unlike the nuclear weapons challenge posed last century, harrowing as that was. Then government policy threatened humanity; today, corporate interests do.

Moral fragmentation. A morally fragmented nation may lack the basic requisites for a conversation—a shared framework of meaning, a minimal level of trust, and an agreed-upon vocabulary. But by failing to converse and arrive at a national (much less international) decision about the biotech revolution, we default to existing powers and interests and likely stumble into disaster.

"Our society currently lives from moral fragments and community fragments only, both of which are being destroyed faster than they are being replenished," writes ethicist Larry L. Rasmussen.

Worldview dynamics. This leads us to a still deeper reality: beneath both economic practice and moral fragmentation lies the foundation of worldview. Among those who press most aggressively for unrestrained development of biotech advances —including nonscientists—worldviews and philosophies such as naturalism, atheism, utilitarianism, and scientific utopianism reign. Much of our culture's élite lives without a working hypothesis of God. Assuming we dwell alone in the universe, they believe we must simply keep improving life until the next comet hits.

Libertarian ideology—which stresses individualism, privacy, moral relativism, unlimited choice-making, and autonomy—folds neatly into these godless worldviews. It holds that no one should deny himself anything that will bring self-realization and is not immediately harmful to another.

Hence a powerful contingent argues for the largely unrestrained pursuit of biotechnology as a matter of personal (including reproductive) liberty. This quest is driven by a utopian dream: overcoming our species' limits through human power and scientific progress.

Some suggest triumphantly that our species is about to evolve right past homo sapiens to what New Republic senior editor Gregg Easterbrook calls homo geneticus. One enthusiast has said that future generations will look back on our time as "the point in history when human beings gained the power to seize control of their own evolutionary destiny."

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October 1 2001, Vol. 45, No. 12