With the approach of America’s 250th birthday, the theme of the Center for Science and Culture’s past year — Endowed by Our Creator, also the title of John West’s recent book — is timely. Dr. West’s subtitle, The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul, indeed reflects an ongoing struggle.
In that battle, as we saw here yesterday, many educated citizens in the West have abandoned the traditional view of man and replaced it with a more contemporary scientific view — one that promulgates a less exalted view of what it means to be human. In purely material scientific terms, human beings are insignificant oddities cast up by chance in an immense and impersonal universe. As Bertrand Russell concluded, “man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving” and which, in turn, predestine him “to extinction in the vast death of the solar system.”
Such pessimism persists in the present despite spectacular advances that have occurred in science. Though Einsteinian and quantum concepts revolutionized accepted ideas of matter, space, and time, science has discovered nothing to elevate the modern view of man. In this modern scientific view only man’s material complexity distinguishes him from other biological structures that inhabit the universe with him. The individual has no claim to unique or enduring dignity. He has lost his distinctively human status. Based on the scientific view of man we have been described as ciphers, naked apes, trousered apes, and hollow men.
“The Rights of Bacteria”
This loss of the distinctively human requires either promoting animals to the human estate, or more likely, relegating man to the level of animals. Biologist Thomas Jukes prognosticated that before long we will hear of “the rights of bacteria” since all that differentiates bacteria from humanity is a “disparity in the length and sequence of DNA molecules.”
Such predictions are not merely theoretical. Dolphin experiments prompted John Lilly to say that “the day that communication is established, the [dolphin] becomes a legal, ethical, moral, and social problem.” The dolphin will then have qualified for “human rights.” A court case in California about a great ape that learned sign language further illustrates the point. With research funds exhausted, the ape’s teachers claimed that because the ape had learned language, it qualified for legal protection and that to return it to the zoo would be “dehumanizing.”
The Mechanized Conception of Man
While some researchers have “personified” their apes, others have mechanized their concept of man. One Carnegie-Mellon robotics researcher suggested that those who deny the “consciousness” of robots display a gross chauvinism in favor of their own form of mental machinery. A conference at Yale on artificial intelligence produced several informal discussions about the problem of defining the political rights of “thinking” machines. More ominously, several attending researchers speculated that the mental machinery of any particular human may eventually be duplicated using silicon instead of “carbon based” parts. They reckoned manufacturing such copies would justify destroying the less durable original.
In an insightful article in the journal Science entitled “The New Biology: What Price Relieving Man’s Estate?” Leon Kass wrote that “we are witnessing the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as something splendid or divine, and its replacement with a view that sees man, no less than nature, as simply more raw material for manipulation and homogenization. Hence our peculiar moral crisis.”
A Game of “Let’s Pretend”
In 1948, Western nations signed the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Today, many, though far from all, still abide by its provisions. Without the concept of “the distinctively human,” however, governments inevitably play a global game of “let’s pretend.” The most impassioned appeals for human rights by politicians and scientists mean nothing if they have abandoned their belief in the distinctive dignity of man. Without this conviction there is no logical ground for supporting human rights in the United States or elsewhere; there is no logical ground for human rights at all. In such a context, those who advocate human rights are practicing species chauvinism.
Tomorrow, “The Science of Darwin and Marx Provides No Support for ‘Unalienable Rights.’”