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Are enhancements a way for us to become more like God?

More like one's vision of God. I understand healing to be restoring the original good God created. Just as Jesus healed, we should use our skills and technology to try to bring the creation back to that good, as much as we can. Unfortunately, people are going to have different notions of what the optimal human being should look like.

If they view God as an arbitrary power with no compassion, then power is the norm. But if they view God as all compassion, then they will view unrestrained compassion as the norm.

And if we see God as Christ, who "did not consider equality with God something to be grasped" but instead took on human flesh, with all its weaknesses, then maybe we wouldn't even aspire to enhance ourselves.

That's exactly right. Add to this the Pauline language about our weakness and the way we are strong when we are weak—those are all arguments that evoke caution about making ourselves "better."

In Natural-Born Cyborgs, cognitive scientist Andy Clark claims that any of us who wears a pacemaker, uses a computer, a pen, or drives a car is already a hybrid of flesh and machine, or a cyborg.

We're not enhancing someone if we give them glasses; we are restoring their sight. I want to reserve healing for restoration of lost capacities, and enhancement for improving on the species, or on the statistical norm.

The statistical norm gives us the average person's way of inhabiting the world. For instance, normal cabinet height in a kitchen is 30 inches because of most people's height. But we know that some people find it difficult because they have the gene for short stature, so we build lower cabinets for them.

You build a world that serves the majority of people and then you make adjustments for those who lack certain capacities or fall below the norm—you make restorations.

But in a world that already has a multi-tiered health care system, should we create a class of genetically or cybernetically enhanced individuals? That's what certain enhancements would do.

But inequality seems to be the way it is in a fallen world. Some people drive expensive cars or shop at Brooks Brothers; others work in sweatshops to barely put food on the table.

I think these injustices are terrible and we ought to repent if we perpetuate them. But as bad as they are, they don't involve the alteration of our species.

This is the first era in which we will have, as far as we know, the ability to alter ourselves in ways that we can then pass on to others through sexual reproduction (for example, in the manipulation of genes). If we get it wrong—if we make a mistake—and pass that on to the next generation, then we could harm the next generation.

If nanotechnology could give our soldiers the greatest chance of survival possible, would you recommend we use it?

Technologies have a tendency to bite back, as Edward Tenner points out in Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. The U.S. used Agent Orange—a chemical it sprayed to defoliate the jungle—to protect our soldiers during the Vietnam War. Now they are suffering the consequences of Agent Orange contamination, long after they left Vietnam.

In the case of the soldier, I'd find enhancements acceptable if the soldier volunteered for the alteration, understanding its consequences, and if it would be an enhancement that's reversible and cannot be passed on to the next generation.

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January 2004, Vol. 48, No. 1