What's Wrong With Designer Babies?

“What’s so bad about creating designer babies?” asks John Stossel:

“Jenna Bush Hager, who's the daughter of former President George W. Bush, recently said that "there should be things that we leave up to God."

"I'm not really sure I'm going to take her word for it," says Brennan. "If God appears before me and says 'don't do this,' I'll stop." 

But why would God say stop?

God would have at least three reasons to say “STOP!” and all three of those reasons revolve around the definition of the word “person.” Mr. Stossel, apparently doesn’t realize it, but by even asking the question, he has put himself in league both with the Progressive liberals who gave us the eugenics mindset and with Karl Marx, whose worldview led logically to Stalin’s socialism. These groups, and others like them, consider persons to be objects, things to be manipulated, and not subjects, persons to be honored.

John Stossel Isn’t The Only One Confused

Although its meaning serves as the foundation for Western law and culture, the Western definition of the word “person” is almost entirely lost. Today, instead of adhering to the ancient Western definition, we attempt to substitute various other worldviews. When we succeed, Western culture always loses.  For instance, most rabbis will assert the soul arrives at “first breath”, that is, at birth. This is the viewpoint we recently enshrined in US law via RvW. It is legal to abort up to the moment the child has “breath in its lungs.” When a fetal body is found in a toilet, the prosecution of the mother for murder relies solely on that test. US law aligns perfectly with Jewish faith.  Substituting Islamic views works no better: Muslims allow abortion, which is just an extreme form of genetic editing, almost universally before four months gestation, and any time the mother’s life is at risk. Hindus, who say every living thing possesses an individual, eternal soul, place the transmigration of the soul into a new body anywhere between conception and birth, depending on exactly which Vedic tradition is followed. Buddhists say there is no such thing as a human soul, but they still view abortion negatively; a Buddhist monk can be expelled from his monastery for assisting in abortion. For both Hindus and Buddhists, it creates very bad karma.

John Stossel is now trying his hand at the game by substituting scientism’s definitions. Some in Stossel’s school would argue “life” or “personhood” begins at “viability”, others, the first appearance of a complete central nervous system, or the first appearance of a heartbeat, or the implantation of the blastocyte in the uterine lining, or the moment of conception, which generally occurs after the egg has travelled about a third of the way down the Fallopian tubes. In each case, the biological event is emphasized as the test for “personhood.”  This emphasis on scientism, on physical tests, is precisely what Stossel endorses and Stalin desired.

The problem is simple: none of the worldviews above were involved in defining the original term. Instead, each necessarily distorts the word’s original meaning in order to shoehorn the term into their worldview. “Person” was defined in a formal, scientific way, nearly two millennia ago. But, the original, ancient definition is entirely incompatible with most modern agendas. Unfortunately, insofar as the word “person” is successfully redefined to fit one of the viewpoints above, Western civilization ceases to exist. By redefining the term, some other form of civilization will, for better or worse, have taken its place.

The Original Definition

The term originated in the formal science that forms the basis for Western civilization. A formal science is quite different than an experimental science. Unlike the latter, formal science does not require experiment. Formal sciences begin with basic propositions and extrapolate a logical framework from those basics. They don't use experiments. The best-known example of a formal science is mathematics.

In math, an axiom is a statement or property considered to be self-evidently true, but yet cannot be proven.  In 1911, the mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead sought to prove that the axioms of math were never self-referential, never self-contradictory. The culmination of their work was the Principia Mathematica, hailed as a masterpiece. Kurt Gōdel, the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, created his “incompleteness” theorem, to counter-demonstrate that the Principia, indeed any logical system as complicated as arithmetic, cannot avoid being self-referential. Math is built upon concepts that simply must be accepted in order to build the logical framework:

"Therefore, it is in fact both true and unprovable. Our system of reasoning is incomplete, because some truths are unprovable."  

We know that the propositions of arithmetic are true. We don’t know how to, in fact, we cannot, prove they are true.

Here’s an unwelcome shock: like math, theology, specifically Christian theology, is also a formal science. Christian theology starts with basic propositions concerning the nature of persons. It then builds a logical framework upon those basic propositions using the tools described in Aristostle's "Logic." In fact, Kurt Gōdel used modal logic to demonstrate the validity of Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God.

Christian theology created the definition of the word “person.” The central mystery – a word we shall return to – the central mystery of Christian theology is the nature of the Trinity. In order to describe the Trinitarian reality, a Christian theologian, Tertullian, stole a Latin stage term, a word used for the mask an actor wore on stage: persona. He then completely redefined this term and used the word to describe the three “Persons” of the Trinity: God is one substance in three persons. The discussion that resulted from this simple statement would eventually result in the creation of both the Declaration of Independence and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Tertullian's Foundation

Tertullian distinguished “nature” from “person.”  “Nature” is the range of actions an entity can take. “Person” is the agent who does it. God’s substance is the Divine Nature. The Divine Nature consists of the Divine Intellect and the Divine Will. The Divine Intellect knows all there is to know, the Divine Will chooses the good. The Divine Persons are the Father, Son and Spirit. Each Divine Person entirely owns the one Divine Intellect and the One Divine Will.  The Divine Nature is not shared. Each Person within the Godhead completely possesses to Himself the single Divine Nature.

The mystery of the Trinity is not the existence of the Divine Nature nor the existence of the Three Persons. The mystery lies in how each Divine Person can completely possess the single Nature without sharing.  We know that it is true. We do not know how it is managed.
We have no experience with such a thing. My intellect and will is mine, I do not share either my intellect nor my will with you, nor do you share either of yours with me. Yet, with the three Divine Persons it is not so. Each Divine Persons completely possesses the one single Divine Nature. The Three Persons know with the same Intellect, the three Persons choose with the same Will. To speak metaphorically, the Three Persons are always of one mind, one heart. This must be true because there is only one God. We do not know exactly how this is accomplished within the Godhead. We do know the answer resides in the relationships between the Persons.

Relations Define Persons

The relationships are simple. The Father eternally begets the Son (active relationship), the Son is eternally begotten by the Father (passive relationship). The Father and Son (or the Father alone, if you are Eastern Orthodox) eternally breathe forth the Spirit (active relationship), the Spirit is eternally breathed forth (passive relationship).  If it were not for these four relationships, there would be no Persons. So, we know relationship defines the Divine Persons.  The Father pours everything He is into the Son, the Son, seeing what the Father does, pours everything He is into the Father. This mutual, total, self-gift is Himself the third Person of the Trinity, the Spirit. Total self-gift is Divine love. This is what we are meant to image.

The paragraph above took moments to write. It took six ecumenical councils, ending with Third Constantinople (680-681 AD) and nearly seven centuries of argument to hammer out the details. The simplest definition of “person” comes from Boethius: “an individual substance of a rational nature." In modern terms, we can say a person is “that which possesses an intellect and a will.”

Notice: a physical body is not necessary to personhood. God is pure spirit. God does not have a body. So, personhood is not defined by body or bodily functions. The Divine Nature consists only of intellect and will, nothing else. The relationships that define the Divine Persons center on intellect and will. “Intellect” means rational thought, “will” means rational choice. So, God is Pure Rationality. But God is not just Pure Rationality. We also know God is Love. The ancient personhood debate revealed that the only rational choice, in fact, the only rational relationship, the single rational relationship which very literally defines all persons, is love. Love is identical to pure rationality.

Jefferson’s Declaration 

This was rather a surprising result, but that single result created Western civilization, because it defined how human beings, human persons, are meant to interact with each other. God is three Persons. Man is made in the image and likness of God. To be fully persons, man must imitate God. This is how theology gets around the self-reference problem that plagued math.

While God loves all things into existence, humans are singled out. From the first moment of our existence, the Persons of God actively forms relationships with us, thereby making us persons. The Father actively begets the Son, the Son receives. The Father (and Son) actively breathe forth the Spirit, the Spirit receives. The Spirit actively pours Himself into us, we receive the Spirit. We in turn actively love God and each other, pouring ourselves out in service of each. Thus, we are images of God. We are persons because of our relationships with God (primarily) and with each other (secondarily). God’s relationship with each of us makes us persons. As images of God, our relationships with each other in a sense “confirm” our personhood.

Thus, the Declaration of Independence, written by a Deist, echoes Christian Scripture. It proclaims “that all men are created equal” by God (Gal 3:28). Jefferson knew men’s bodies are not equal: some are weak, some strong, some capable, some less so. Jefferson certainly didn’t mean biological equality or even equality in opportunity. Equal opportunity is an empty catch-phrase if the resources to leverage that opportunity vary wildly, as biological capacity certainly does. Jefferson meant "equal in rights," but which rights?

The last book of Christian Scripture was written a scant century before the personhood debates began. The recognition of which books had Divine origins occurred just as those debates reached their heights. Christian Scripture was defined simultaneously with "personhood." The New Testament insists all persons have equal right to hope for salvation (Gal 3:28).

Jefferson was a Deist, but he was also a deeply serious student of the New Testament – in fact, he created his own expurgated version. He simply repeated Scripture. Since God has dignity and God has rights, we who are made in His image, have dignity, we have rights. Since the Persons of the Trinity are co-equal in all things (except relationship), every human is co-equal in this dignity and these rights. His Declaration of Independence recognizes the Divine origin of the equal rights of persons. Not equal capacities, not equal opportunities, not equal biologies, but equal rights to “the pursuit of Happiness,” which, even for a Trinitarian-denying Deist, meant happiiness not just in this life, but primarily happiness in heaven.

In the Declaration’s phrasing, Jefferson echoed the idea that each “person” is made in the image and likeness of God. Jefferson despised Trinitarian theology, but because the Christian concept of "personhood" founded his entire worldview, he literally could not avoid grounding the Declaration in this very same Trinitarian theology, in the theology of personhood. Man images God via Divine grace, man bears likeness to God via the human soul, composed of the human intellect and human will. We are persons because God calls us to be in rational relationship with Himself, the Persons of the Trinity. Man’s likeness, his intellect and will, make him rational, makes personal relationship possible. Our rational capacity not only makes us persons, it allows us to name ourselves homo sapiens, man of wisdom. It gives us dignity, it gives us rights. Though he was not a Trinitarian, given what Jefferson wanted to say, he had nowhere else to go.

The Lessons of Personhood

We can take several lessons here. First, only Christianity has ever had this extensive debate. No other worldview requires a definition of personhood, so no other system ever clarified what personhood is. The center of Christian theology revolves around personhood because the centerpiece of Christian theology is contemplation and union with the Persons of the Trinity.  Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, name whatever “-ism” you wish, none of them have so strenuously struggled to precisely define personhood, as Christianity has. Most worldviews have not even recognized it as an essential issue.

Second, the heart of personhood is rational relationships. While Christians rightly discarded massive amounts of Greek and Latin writings that incorrectly described how the world worked, the one writing the West never lost was Aristotle’s Logic, His description of how to consider all matters rationally was a touchstone for all of Christian thought. The Christian emphasis on rational consideration reached one of its notable high points with Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. The Summa, Aquinas’ attempt to systematically present the basics tenets of Christianity, was enshrined along with the Scriptures on the altar at the Council of Trent. Unlike Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, the Summa avoided the self-reference problem by demonstrating everything ultimately derived from the Persons of God.

Third, personal relationships do not rely on biological function. The soul is the form of the body, the body is the tool of the soul. If one person has a faulty tool, a body incapable of communicating with other human persons as well as we might prefer, this in no way impairs that person’s relationship with God. That individual’s rights are still equal to the rights held by any other person, for the rights do not flow from government, but from God, from His relationship with each human person. God is completely self-sufficient. He doesn’t need us. The rationale for each personal relationship is not utility, but love.

How It Fell Apart

We smile when Tony Stark says to his daughter "I love you tons" and the little one replies, "I love you 3000!" We know instinctively that there is something childishly erroneous about the exchange, which is what makes it adorable.

The two, both adult and child, are mixing experimental science with formal science. The formal science of theology describes relationships via quality ("I love you..."). Experimental science describes relationships via numbers ("tons," "3000!").  When doing experimental science, when describing objects, numbers decide. When doing formal science, describing rational qualities of the soul, love decides.

The two sciences do not overlap. Experimental science has no way to quantitatively measure qualities of the soul, i.e., qualities of the person, like love, honor, sin, vice, virtue. Similarly, theological sciences, which are created to describe the quality of relationships between persons, has no place for quantitative measure. "3000" and "tons"  are not measures theology can use. 

Like many ancient philosophies, pagan Rome and Greece philosophies disliked experiment, preferring the life of the mind over that of the hands.  In both of their Divine pantheons, the god who worked with his hands, Vulcan/Hephaestus, was the only god who was ugly, physically deformed and constantly cuckolded, the only god ejected from heaven. The work of the hands was the work of slaves. This is why Judaism and its son, Christianity, were both considered the religion of slaves: the God of Genesis worked with His hands in the clay of the earth, as a slave would.

In addition, all pagan philosophies assigned personal agency to inanimate objects. Both their theology of nymphs, naiads, dryads and their philosophy, in which Aristotle argued that even inanimate objects have a kind of purpose and action, reinforced this view. For example, Aristotle asserted rocks fell because they "wanted" to be at the center of the universe (the earth). While Christianity slowly converted the pagans to a new worldview, many old misunderstandings, which were not obviously related to Christian theology, were slower to be abandoned. Experimental science was recognized as valid – both the Old and the New Testaments contain descriptions of experiments and emphasize the importance of the physical test – but, the formal sciences were held in highest regard. As a result, Greeks, Romans and early Christians all made a serious error: the formal sciences of theology and philosophy, not the experimental sciences, were used to define both the relationships between persons and the relationships between objects.

As Christian theology more deeply suffused every aspect of European thought, the problem created by this mis-match became more apparent. The problem was complex. Human persons are a unity of subject and object, soul and body. The seven Christian sacraments used to minister to man's body/soul unity are themselves a unity of divine grace and creation. Distinguishing object from subject, body from soul, without harming the correct understanding of either, was not an easy task.

Various attempts were made to solve the problem. Some, like Martin Luther, tried to resolve it by throwing away the Christian theology of sacrament, which could only be done by repudiating logic itself. Luther's cry "Reason is the whore of the devil!” resulted in the absurdity we call "blind faith." The "blind faith" movement was nonsensical, but it meant hard thinking was no longer necessary. This appealed to many unwilling to do the hard work of thinking clearly. A century later, Galileo demonstrated the formal science and language of math was superior to the formal science of theology in describing how objects interacted, but by then, it was too late to fix the error Luther had introduced. Within a century, England’s last Catholic king was overthrown (1688). From that point forward, the Protestant appeal to “blind faith” ruled the English colonies.

While England was never Lutheran, Protestant England adopted much of Luther’s worldview. Luther’s rejection of formal logic and insistence on an incorrect understanding of fallen human nature, led him to a false understanding of rationality, faith and personhood itself. Mathematical fields developed by Catholic scientists, like Pascal’s discovery of statistics and Galileo’s discovery of mechanics, focused attention on objects instead of persons. These trends seemed to tear theology in two. This, in turn, meant that by 1896, Andrew Dickson White could write his book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, and have its wildly erroneous history accepted as Gospel truth, Today, America, still a Protestant culture to its core, considers logic and religious faith contradictory, simply because its entire experience with religious faith is the experience of Luther's Protestantism, a worldview that barely acknowledges the original Christian development of the “person.” This loss of memory was not always accidental.

Stalin Understood

Few people realize that Josef Stalin spent five years in study at the Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis, Georgia, wearing cassocks every day and living the life of a seminarian. He was also one of the seminary’s top students before he was expelled. Though an atheist when he ruled the Soviet Union, he had been trained in liturgical Christianity, Russian Orthodoxy. He knew the history of the word “person” intimately.  So, when the UN began formulating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he made a point of having Soviet diplomats object to the documents’ use of the word “person.” Since the word “person” was a religious term, such use, the Soviet atheists said, constituted the establishment of Christian faith as the overarching worldview of the UN. The Soviets insisted rights flowed from government to human beings. The word “person” implied rights derived from something other than government. American diplomats, being Protestant and relatively ignorant of Christian history, had no idea what the Soviets were talking about.

But Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain and René Cassin, two of the principals behind the Declaration, understood Stalin’s objection. This is part of the reason the Declaration starts not with a right, but with a definition:

Article 1 . All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. 

As we can now see, the Declaration's definition is simply a paraphrase of the definition of the word “person” hammered out by the ecumenical councils a millennium before. It omits only Jefferson's observation that the Creator is the One Who endows human beings with freedom, equality, dignity, rights, reason and conscience. Since the UN document used. at the insistence of an Indian delegate, the phrase “human being” instead of the word “man” or “person”, and did not reference the Creator, the definition was generally accepted. The document passed. The Soviets abstained from the vote. The ancient Christian understanding of the word “person” is now enshrined not just in the Declaration of Independence, but also, via the UN, as a fundamental value of all nations. It has had a profound effect on the development of not just two millennia of Western European culture and law, but on all subsequent international law.

Returning to the Problem

So, when does the person begin existence? Experimental science, which deals only with the human body, cannot tell us. But the formal science of theology can. Follow the logic: sin is the absence of the grace necessary to be in full, rational relationship with God. Since persons alone are called into relationship with God, only persons can sin. Non-persons, such as chairs, dogs, or clumps of cells, are not persons and cannot sin. The Blessed Virgin Mary is a simple human person, a woman. She is also the Immaculate Conception. If  Mary is sinless from the moment of conception, she must be a person from the moment of conception. Since we are all, apart from sinlessness, no different from Mary, then we are all persons from the moment of conception. The left rejects this reasoning as empty religious posturing. The right refuses to supply this reasoning for fear of being accused of imposing theocracy. And so we stumble together, hand-in-hand, towards Stalin. Given what we are willing to say, we have nowhere else to go.

The moment of conception is not just a biological event, it is also, and primarily, a theological event. Experimental science can demonstrate the biology, but it can never demonstrate the theology. Insofar as we emphasize the biology, insofar as we attempt to define “person” as something man defines instead of something God establishes, we support Stalin’s objection.

When Stossel insists on "designer babies", he insists on a child made by committee, designed by teams, treated like an object. Each child will have not one, but a thousand fathers, not one, but a hundred thousand mothers. This is a "child" whose existence does not flow from the love between persons, but a "child", a person who has been redefined by government committee - and who really believes government will not get involved? -  to the nth degree.

Ovulation, ejaculation, uniting gametes in a lab dish, allowing a conceptus to reach a particular stage of development, whether in the womb or out, all of these biological stages are regulated by human persons. A government is just a group of human persons acting together.

So, if we accept the idea that personhood flows solely from a biology controlled by men, then we accept that personhood results solely from a group of human persons acting together. We will have judged Stalin right and Jefferson wrong: rights flow from government, from human persons, not from Divine Persons, not from God. The original definition of “person” will be changed, and we will no longer be ruled by either the Declaration of Independence, nor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We will be ruled by capricious, ordinary men and women. Our rights will flow from their whims. Two millennia of constant usage will have gone by the wayside. The word “person” will have been successfully redefined. Western civilization will be at an end.