2 of 3

With a daughter nearing the end of high school, you begin to receive dozens of glossy promotional brochures from colleges and universities. The pictures in one brochure look like the pictures from another. Many of the pictures are of smiling students. Whatever the text says, the pictures suggest that college is an extraordinarily harmonious place. The text says, somewhere, that this college will teach students to think for themselves, but the pictures say that all right-thinking people are pretty much agreed on the essentials.

You would never guess from these pictures that the smiling young woman with the auburn hair and the slim young man with the crooked grin, sitting next to her on the quad, see the world in very different ways. He thinks that when you die, you're dead; that's it. How did we get here? Who knows? "A glorious accident," Stephen Jay Gould calls it; let's leave it at that. Meanwhile, he has a life to live. She believes that the core of herself, her soul, will survive death to dwell with the God who created her, and us, and everything.

Like it or not, we're engaged in conflict—not necessarily a physical conflict (though it can turn physical very quickly) but rather a conflict of interpretations, a conflict of ideas, a spiritual conflict: a conflict about the nature of reality and our place in it.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Visit Books & Culture online at BooksandCulture.com or subscribe here.

For more commentary on cloning, see today's Weblog. Also appearing on our site today:

CT Classic: Doctors Under Oath | Modern medicine has misplaced its moral compass. Can Hippocrates help?

Yahoo's full coverage has current news articles and opinion pieces on human cloning.

The House passed a bill in July banning human cloning. Not long after, a team of scientists stirred up controversy by saying they would do it anyway. Three scientists addressed a National Academies of Science conference on Aug. 7 and revealed their plans to possibly clone humans by the end of the year.

For explanations on how cloning is accomplished, see Conceiving a Clone, Science Matters, and How Cloning Works.

Christianity Today recommended against human cloning in a 1997 editorial, "Stop Cloning Around." Other recent articles on cloning include:

The New Tyranny | Biotechnology threatens to turn humanity into raw material. (Oct. 5, 2001)

Times Fifty | Can a clone be an individual? A short story. (Oct. 2, 2001)

Wanna Buy a Bioethicist? (Editorial) | Some corporations have discovered that bioethics makes good public relations. (Sept. 28, 2001)

House Backs Human Cloning Ban | Scientists say they'll go ahead anyway. (September 3, 2001)

House of Lords Legalizes Human Embryo Cloning | Religious leaders' protests go unheeded by lawmakers. (Feb. 2, 2001)

Britain Debates Cloning of Human Embryos | Scientists want steady stream of stem cells for "therapeutic" purposes. (Nov. 22, 2000)

Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

"Discovering" Islam: The Intellectual Challenge | There's good reason to believe that there will be staying power to the West's belated "discovery" of Islam. (Nov. 19, 2001)

Disturbing the Peace | Is art always subversive when it's doing its job? (Nov. 12, 2001)

Play Ball | Baseball, leisure, and worship. (Nov. 2, 2001)

Is God a Body-Snatcher? | The restless intelligence of philosopher Peter van Inwagen. (Oct. 30, 2001)

"Science and the Spiritual Quest" | A place at the table for Christians, but at a price. (Oct. 22, 2001)

Beyond Belief? | Nobel Prize-winner V.S. Naipaul's accounts of Islam presuppose the superiority of modern skepticism. (Oct. 15, 2001)

Covering Islam | Getting beyond the feel-good bromides. (Oct. 8, 2001)

Christian Scholarship … For What? | Academic speakers affirm the value of beholding God's creation. (Oct. 1, 2001)

Myths of the Taliban | Misinformation and disinformation abounds. What do we know? (Sept. 24, 2001)

The Imagination of Disaster | "We thought we were invulnerable." Really? (Sept. 17, 2001)

More Sex, Fewer Children | Mixed messages on condoms, contraception, and fertility. (Sept. 10, 2001)

The Strange Case of Napoleon Beazley | The latest poster boy for death row chic. (Aug. 27, 2001)

Apocalyptic City | The dream and the nightmare of megalopolis (Aug. 20, 2001)

Megalopolis Forty Years On | The ambiguous face of the city. (Aug. 13, 2001)

The Future Is Now | You want the news? Read science fiction. (Aug. 6, 2001)

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

November (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45