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captainrick
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A clone would be human. It would grow from a human cell to a fetus, to a baby. Instead of the clones one parent, normal humans have two. Why would God not consider a clone human?
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Polycarp1
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A clone would not be a complete human being . It would be merely a duplicate of our physical bodies but the cells it was cloned from wouldn’t grow a spiritual soul as the soul is not physical and thus not part the physical body but can and will exist apart from the body.I’m not following here.A human clone is essentially a delayed twin. I see no reason to think that a human clone produced artificially would not have a spiritual soul, any more than a person who is conceived via IVF or even by rape or adultery would not have a spiritual soul. All of these are against God’s laws and contrary to His plan, but that doesn’t make the people born from these processes less human.
As I understand it, as long as there is a human body, there is a human soul, which by God’s design is a spiritual, rational, immortal soul. It’s impossible for a human being to have an animal soul.
And if it’s a human being, then he inherits the Original Sin of his first parent. Just because he is brought into being in a way contrary to God’s plan doesn’t affect his humanity.
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Robyn_p
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This is mistaken. Human beings do not grow spiritual souls. We can’t. God creates them from nothing at the moment of conception. The cells do not effect anything.
A clone is exactly the same as an identical twin, just produced technologically. We don’t say identical twins are not complete human beings and therefore don’t have spiritual souls, even though all of their DNA is duplicated from the original. God still gives them an individual soul. I see no reason to think He wouldn’t do that with cloned human beings.
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weller2
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Well, there is no reason to oppose cloning then.
How about we grow your clone and check experimentally?
Oh, wait. How do you check if someone has a soul?
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weller2
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Careful here. Ensoulment at conception is not an official teaching of the Church. The official teaching is that the Church does not know when the ensoulment happens.
Ensoulment at conception seems to be the preferred interpretation today, because it provides a strong anti-abortion argument. But it also leads to major absurdities – e.g. what about embryos which fail to attach to the womb, or attach in the wrong place (ectopic pregnancy).
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weller2
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I am afraid that God does not have to follow your wishes. God will ensoul whoever (whatever) he wants. In principle, God, being omnipotent, could even infuse a human soul into a tree.
What do you see on the image below?
http://drsophiayin.com/images/uploads/rainbowandcc.jpg
I see two cats. If you see a cat and its clone, can you tell which is which, and how?
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captainrick
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I see 2 cats - if I see that they have identical DNA, then they are either identical twins from the same litter, or one is a clone. No way to tell. Either way they are both beautiful cats. Mammals have been cloned (Dolly the sheep, 1996).
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glendab
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Hello Weller,
Glenda
This is a very good example of zeitgeist on your part. Thank you.
Glenda
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mikekle
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Well, I believe for someone to actually have a soul, they have to be ‘born’ from a womb, being created in a lab and grown in machines is far from natural. I recognize God can do whatever he wishes and could give a soul to anything, but the question is…would he?
Lets say they clone a 18 yr old man, then we have (2) men, and no one can tell them apart, they go out and live their lives and then die, if the original man was to die a good faithful person, he would go to heaven, but would his clone then also get a ‘free ride’ to heaven, just because it is basically the same person? IDK, and it raises some odd questions, but I think if God starts treating clones the same as people he created, he would be giving mankind credit for becoming ‘gods’, in the sense, mankind would then be able to create life, when in all times in the past, this was something only God could do.
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captainrick
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No, if you clone an 18 year old man, you have an embryo which will grow to become a man in 18 years, identical to the original.
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captainrick
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AND, I forgot to add: Men would not be acting “godlike” by growing a clone - a clone grows from a donor cell from a natural human being, created by God, using processes provided by God. The clone grows to be a baby, then to an adult.
If you think that clones would not be human, is it okay to kill them? Oooops! sounds like a pro-abortion argument! “They are not humans, so terminate them.”
If you think that clones would not be human, is it okay to kill them? Oooops! sounds like a pro-abortion argument! “They are not humans, so terminate them.”
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Polycarp1
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A clone is something different all together. You could not clone the part of the soul that is purely spiritual. Case in point, how would you clone an angel which is a purely spiritual soul but without a physical body. What would be your starting material that you would put in the petrie dish? Humans are hybrids with both a physical and spiritual component. We could clone one part but not the other. A human clone may have the part of the soul that is the life principle that all organic organisms have but wouldn’t have the spiritual soul that only human beings have.
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Robyn_p
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I agree. We can’t possibly clone or create a spiritual soul, because it’s immaterial. Only God can and does create the spirit.
You pointed out that we could clone one part of the human being, the body, but not the other. But isn’t this exactly what happens even in natural reproduction? The mother and father provide the one part of the person, the body, but the soul is immediately and directly created by God. We never have any participation in the creation of the soul. We just provide one aspect of the human person, God does the rest.
I still see no solid basis to say a cloned individual is not a human being. They have human DNA, and where there is a human body there is by necessity a human soul, which is by God’s design a rational, spiritual, immortal one. This is actually precisely why the Church condemns human cloning, but not animal or plant cloning. Because what results is a REAL human being, who deserves all the rights of a person, and cloning reduces him to a product.
The fact that their DNA is copied from someone else’s body, or that this process is done artificially, really doesn’t affect anything as far as the spiritual soul goes. Because, as I said in my last post, this duplication is what happens naturally with identical twins, and the fact that they are created in a Petri dish, while wrong, wouldn’t affect anything either, because this is what happens with IVF babies. If we are going to say clones are not human beings, where do we draw the line? That’s my issue here.
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Robyn_p
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True. It’s not official yet you’re right. My point was mainly that it’s God who directly creates the soul from nothing, and that the soul doesn’t grow from some material inside of us.
Though I don’t quite see ensoulment at conception leading to absurdities however. Those things you mention are tragedies, but so are all miscarriages and pregnancy complications. :sad_yes: Having a soul doesn’t necessarily mean those kind of things won’t happen.
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weller2
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Let’s take surogate motherhood with IVF. Does the child receive the original sin via: (a) genetic father, (b) genetic mother or (c) surrogate mother?
If your answer is (c), then consider, hypothetically, that an animal (such as cow or pig) is used as surogate. In such case the original sin would not transmitted because animals are not fallen.
If the answer is (a) or (b) then it means that original sin is a genetic disease, which means that the responsible loci could be identified and modifed using genetic engineering (at least in principle). Voila, designer babies – free of original sin!
So again, the development of medicine has pretty much killed Augustine’s idea that original sin is transmitted via sexual reproduction – because we have effectively developed asexual reproduction when we have developed IVF. So either IVF transmits original sin, or it does not. If it does, that means that Augustine was wrong (and a large part of Catholic theology is called into question, particularly the teachings on Virgin Mary and sexuality). If Augustine was right, then IVF does not transmit original sin, but that would mean that each IVF baby is immaculately conceived, i.e. free of original sin. You can see where that leads.
Catholic theologians have managed to handwave the problem created by IVF by asserting ensoulment at conception. Fertilization of the egg creates a genetically distinct individual, this individual is ensouled, and in process somehow inherits original sin.
But cloning falsifies that defense. We start with a woman, we take her ovum, we place DNA from her somatic cell into that ovum, and implant the embryo into her uterus. The embryo develops, and she gives birth to a child which is her genetic copy… But there was no conception! So there can be no ensoulment!
This is patent nonsense: at the end, you will get a perfectly functioning human, so it follows that this human must be ensouled. If this human is something that your theology says cannot exist, then I posit that the problem is with your theology, and not with the human in question.
Problem is, what I have written above is a heresy according to the Council of Trent:
This view has been reiterated in Humani Generis (in a different context), which actually references the above decree of Trent:
From where I sit, an IVF baby, and even more so a clone is a true man who did not take their origin through natural generation from Adam, as its creation involved an obviously unnatural step. Hence the sentiment that IVF babies and/or clones are not true men (i.e. lack soul), because acknowledging their full humanity would be equivalent to a formal heresy.
In other words, we have new Gallileo affair. Science has discovered (produced) things which cannot exist according to Catholic theology. Even worse: saying that they do exist is a formal heresy, which in turn carries an automatic latae sentenciae excommunication.
Mankind has already learned to do things which only God could do in the past – annihilation of Sodom and Gomorra was a child’s play compared to what we can do with thermonuclear weapons.
Also, for your information, we have already assembled a bacterium from scratch. Vatican handwaved that, saying that no new life was created, essentially because the DNA was copied from an existing bacterium: patentdocs.org/2010/06/venter-denies-synthetic-cell-discovery-is-artificial-life-vatican-agrees.html
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weller2
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That’s going off-topic, but there are several problems with ensoulment at conception:
- If the blastocyst splits, producing twins, what happens with the soul?
- The same for siamese twins – where we have an incomplete split.
- Something like half of all fertilized eggs fail to implant – that’s a great waste of souls – and in Catholicism souls don’t reincarnate – where do they go?
- Ectopic pregnancy and other complications – why would you give a soul to something which will either die, or kill the woman and then die?
- Molar pregnancy – a fertilized egg which develops into cancer – either completely, or cancer mixed with fetal tissue – what about that?
- Anencephalia – a child without part of the brain responsible for higher functions.
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mikekle
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Using this kind of logic would suggest we dont really even need God anymore in modern times, or in future times, when our technology will be unbelievable.
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His_angel
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The concept that a human clone would not be a person, or lack a soul, and have no dignity or value of a person is abhorrent. I’ve read, as the OP said, the occasional SciFi novel where that was the premise and it never made sense to me. It’s obviously a person. And yet there are at least two here who are saying that is not the case in this thread.
Cloning as we know it is not science fiction. You create an entirely new person, just with the same physical dna. Exactly the same as identical twins. There is a new soul for either the twin/clone, and their actions and thoughts and lives are entirely different.
It is immoral because you are creating human persons outside of the bonds of marriage and sex. Same for IVF. The embryos destroyed, though created in a lab, are babies.
Cloning as we know it is not science fiction. You create an entirely new person, just with the same physical dna. Exactly the same as identical twins. There is a new soul for either the twin/clone, and their actions and thoughts and lives are entirely different.
It is immoral because you are creating human persons outside of the bonds of marriage and sex. Same for IVF. The embryos destroyed, though created in a lab, are babies.
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mikekle
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Big difference in an identical twin and a clone, a twin is created and formed in the womb, in other words, done by God, a clone would be something mankind did, or interfering with what nature intended IMO. I understand the science behind it though, but disagree that the clone would have a soul.
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His_angel
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IVF is also done in a lab. Man interferes with God all the time. It’s wrong of course, but in cases like this the children made from such interferences are still human, and still have souls.
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