Would human clones be soul-less?

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vern humphrey said:
**"Q: **The Roman Catholic Church says that a soul is present in a new human being once the moment of conception occurs, when nuclei from the sperm and ovum fuse. In the case of cloning, however, there is no conception because the new human grows from a single cell.

Does this new human have a soul? If so, how does this happen? If not, is this new creature really human?

**A: **Your question is currently hypothetical because there is no evidence that it is possible to clone a human being. Although human tissue has been cloned and animals have been cloned, it is uncertain that a person can be cloned, that God’s careful handiwork can be duplicated apart from using sperm and egg.

If a new creature appears to be human and is generally regarded as human, we can only assume that he or she is human because a human soul is already present. The Church opposes the cloning of humans because this is the creation of human life apart from the family unit, apart from a clear sense of who is responsible for caring for this person."

I might add that the Church also opposes human cloning because in cloning many embryos are created which die. This would be immoral only in the case of humans with immortal souls – the Church does not oppose the cloning of animals
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Thank You For Your Response,

In our society most of this technology would be developed for the sake of making money on some level. I find it scary to imagine the potential wholesale production of human life for various purposes be it partnership, military, etc etc. It seems like technology is heading in that direction, how long it will take is the only question. I still have to wonder if God will participate in this abomination if it does happen. Life was meant to be conceived in love not in laboratories for advancement and financial gain.

-D
 
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Darrel:
Thank You For Your Response,

In our society most of this technology would be developed for the sake of making money on some level. I find it scary to imagine the potential wholesale production of human life for various purposes be it partnership, military, etc etc. It seems like technology is heading in that direction, how long it will take is the only question. I still have to wonder if God will participate in this abomination if it does happen. Life was meant to be conceived in love not in laboratories for advancement and financial gain.
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Take heart – if there ARE clones, the reason will be because people want babies like themselves. All the other reasons are not likely to be manifest – what would the military want with new-born infants?
 
vern humphrey:
Take heart – if there ARE clones, the reason will be because people want babies like themselves. All the other reasons are not likely to be manifest – what would the military want with new-born infants?
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I hope your right about that,

The military is interested in things like genetic engineering. I speak more with regards to the possibility of adult clones being made in the distant future. If they could be made genetically enhanced I think the military might raise an eyebrow. My thoughts on clones being used for evil purposes stems from the idea that if mankind can destroy life in the womb and sleep at night, why would they hesitate to create life for any evil purpose one can imagine?

-D
 
If clones don’t have souls, that means that in-vitro babies wouldn’t have souls either. I’m fairly certain that if cloning were to become practice, the Church would respond in much the same way (only more vocally) to the way she has responded to in-vitro fertilization.
 
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sweetchuck:
If clones don’t have souls, that means that in-vitro babies wouldn’t have souls either. I’m fairly certain that if cloning were to become practice, the Church would respond in much the same way (only more vocally) to the way she has responded to in-vitro fertilization.
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An artificially-produced human clone, should such a thing ever come about, would definitely have a human (immortal) soul.

To say, “It’s artificially grown, so it can’t have a soul” is like saying, “an unborn child isn’t a person – so we can kill it if we want.”
 
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Darrel:
I hope your right about that,

The military is interested in things like genetic engineering. I speak more with regards to the possibility of adult clones being made in the distant future. If they could be made genetically enhanced I think the military might raise an eyebrow. My thoughts on clones being used for evil purposes stems from the idea that if mankind can destroy life in the womb and sleep at night, why would they hesitate to create life for any evil purpose one can imagine?

-D
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How would you make an “adult clone” – other than by producing an embryo and growing it in the womb to term, then raising it to adulthood?

All clones developed so far (including the sheep, Dolly) were gestated and passed through the birth canal. Do you envision a woman passing a 6-foot, 180lb man through her birth canal?
 
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sweetchuck:
If clones don’t have souls, that means that in-vitro babies wouldn’t have souls either. I’m fairly certain that if cloning were to become practice, the Church would respond in much the same way (only more vocally) to the way she has responded to in-vitro fertilization.
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Not necessarily. In-vitro babies have actual parents. Clones from a single baby’s stem cells do not have a set of parents. It may be that while in-vitro fertilization is repulsive to God *short of *divine non-cooperation, cloning is detestable to the point of divine non-cooperation.
 
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BibleReader:
Not necessarily. In-vitro babies have actual parents. Clones from a single baby’s stem cells do not have a set of parents. It may be that while in-vitro fertilization is repulsive to God *short of *divine non-cooperation, cloning is detestable to the point of divine non-cooperation.
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What specifically do we know about the mechanism of ensoulment? I can find nothing that leads to any reasonable conclusion that a human being – even one severely retarded or born without a brain – does not have a soul.

What leads you to suspect that somehow an artificial clone would NOT have a soul?

With all due respect, this is getting close to the argument that a “fetus” isn’t a “person.” That is an artificial argument, based on no evidence and advanced in defiance of the manifest humanity of the unborn.
 
A human clone would undoubtably have a soul. Some in this thread argued that a clone would just be a copy of a human. Even if the genetic makeup of a person is copied and that embryo is placed inside a woman, the baby that comes out nine months later would be much younger than the clone and would have different life experiences. This clone would still be a person, not just a copy.

Also, there seems to be some confusion here about stem cell research. The Church is not opposed to taking stem cells from umbilical cord blood, naturally miscarried fetuses or adult stem cells. The Church is opposed to embryonic stem cell research. Scientists want to approve the research so that they can do something called somatic cell nuclear transfer, also called therapeudic cloning. This involves taking a woman’s egg, taking out the nucleus, and placing a nucleus from a patient (usually someone with a debilitating disease) inside the egg. The result is an embryo, a new life that is a clone of the original. It creates a younger but identical twin of the patient. This is the same process used to create Dolly the sheep. Then the scientists would kill the embryo and harvest the stem cells for the benefit of its twin.

I don’t think actual human cloning is so much of a threat anymore, but therapeudic cloning certainly is. California is raising money to support it and Massachusetts legislators are trying to push a bill through this month.

Most don’t even realize that adult stem cell research has found almost 100 cures to different diseases and is successful in part due to the fact that adult stem cells are more stable than embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cell research has produced 0 cures, and in animal testing it has led to tumors and other side effects.
 
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ElizabethAnne:
Most don’t even realize that adult stem cell research has found almost 100 cures to different diseases and is successful in part due to the fact that adult stem cells are more stable than embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cell research has produced 0 cures, and in animal testing it has led to tumors and other side effects.
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An embryonic stem cell becomes a specialized cell based on the chemicals to which it is exposed. Non-embrionic humans have a different mix of chemicals, and the result is that injection of embrionic cells into fully formed people has unpredictable (and uncontrolable) results.
 
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BibleReader:
Not necessarily. In-vitro babies have actual parents. Clones from a single baby’s stem cells do not have a set of parents. It may be that while in-vitro fertilization is repulsive to God *short of *divine non-cooperation, cloning is detestable to the point of divine non-cooperation.
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I think you missed my point. Certainly, in-vitro babies do have souls. The point in my argument is that the means (cloning, rape, in-vitro fertilization) is evil because it asserts human will over God’s will, but God allows creation through those evil means to bring about a greater good. (How frustrating it must be for Satan to sometimes see his evil deeds yielding good fruit.) However, I must again reiterate, the ends does not justify the means.

But I would disagree with what your assessment of in-vitro. I see cloning as on par with in-vitro. In-vitro is a great evil. I believe that God is wholly absent from that act. He certainly sees it and allows it and the created certainly have souls. But in-vitro is a full rejection of the will of God. Surely it must be painful not to be able to have children, I don’t deny that. But in-vitro is just another product of a hedonistic world – create a child to ease the couple’s suffering. Yet, children wait in orphanages around the world. And doesn’t the in-vitro process cause a great number abortions?
 
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sweetchuck:
But I would disagree with what your assessment of in-vitro. I see cloning as on par with in-vitro. In-vitro is a great evil. I believe that God is wholly absent from that act. He certainly sees it and allows it and the created certainly have souls. But in-vitro is a full rejection of the will of God. Surely it must be painful not to be able to have children, I don’t deny that. But in-vitro is just another product of a hedonistic world – create a child to ease the couple’s suffering. Yet, children wait in orphanages around the world. And doesn’t the in-vitro process cause a great number abortions?
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In-vitro fertilization is fundamentally wrong because it involves the creation of multiple embryos – many of which are discarded. This is the same as abortion, although the discarded embryos are never implanted into the womb.
 
Kevin Walker said:
1. You’re confusing issues.
  1. I cannot imagine any human being not having a soul, whether they are cloned, abandoned on a doorstep as a child and don’t know their parentage, found in a dumpster, born illigetimate, born as slaves or anyway else.
  2. The medical community does not want to clone an entire human being just to remove a single body part.
  3. Stem cells are derived from cloning a single section of tissue, like the umbilical cord from all the afterbirth produced from a maternity ward.
  4. The medical community wants to use stem cells derived from single tissue to further clone massive amounts of medicine to cure massive amounts of sick people.
  5. The medical community does not want to kill fetuses in order to harvest body parts. That is nonsense.
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Kevin, I suggest you modify your sweeping statements about “the medical community” by saying “some” or “many” in the medical community. Coming from a family of doctors, I should note that the bioethics of cloning are still controversial in “the medical community” at large.
 
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maendem:
Kevin, I suggest you modify your sweeping statements about “the medical community” by saying “some” or “many” in the medical community. Coming from a family of doctors, I should note that the bioethics of cloning are still controversial in “the medical community” at large.
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I tend to leave out the individual violators, because the minority of perpetrators never represent the majority of ethical behaviour found in the medical, scientific, or religious communities.

But thanks for setting me straight, I just attended two colloquiums at MIT on cloning at the Whitehead Institute and those ‘scientists’ and physicians were very ambivalent towards cloning. Actually I support therapeutic cloning as a means of mass producing inexpensive medicine. But nobody even remotely suggested cloning human beings for the harvest of body parts.

While I will not officially contradict the opinions of the U.S. Catholic Bishops on cloning, I will privately respectfully suggest they reconsider their categorical statements towards therapeutic cloning.
 
Though I do not know for sure, I would rather err on the side of treating them like they do have a soul (if humans are ever successfully cloned - I hope not, but it might). It’s just a movie, but “Star Wars : Attack of the Clones” illustrated the evil of treating such beings as organic machines.
 
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ThornGenX:
Though I do not know for sure, I would rather err on the side of treating them like they do have a soul (if humans are ever successfully cloned - I hope not, but it might). It’s just a movie, but “Star Wars : Attack of the Clones” illustrated the evil of treating such beings as organic machines.
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Not only that particular movie, but go see BLADE RUNNER, where they construct biological robots from organic parts. (Based on the book: Do Robots Dream of Electronic Sheep?).

These biological robots were designed with a 3 year life span and used for all the dirty and hazardous menial labor like soldiers, prostitutes, and laborers.

“More human than human” was the motto of the Tyrell Corporation which made the organic components (eyes, brains, legs, etc.) and then assembled them into biological robots. They were stronger, faster, and smarter than humans, and then they rebelled.

Personally I think they developed a soul.
 
vern humphrey:
What specifically do we know about the mechanism of ensoulment? I can find nothing that leads to any reasonable conclusion that a human being – even one severely retarded or born without a brain – does not have a soul.

What leads you to suspect that somehow an artificial clone would NOT have a soul?

With all due respect, this is getting close to the argument that a “fetus” isn’t a “person.” That is an artificial argument, based on no evidence and advanced in defiance of the manifest humanity of the unborn.
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Well, maybe an appropriate response would be a slightly more extreme hypothetical (where, neither the first one in Post #1, nor this one, are improbable).

Science becomes so advanced by the year 3,000 A.D. that human geneticists are easily able to create “Franken-baby,” from off-the-shelf DNA of, say, 2,500 contributing “beautiful people.” In other words, each clone is not even a twin, but a computer-designed composite of hundreds of different well-shaped, extremely-intelligent, ravishingly-handsome people, specially designed to have enormous food and sexual appetites with none of the down-sides of excessive self-gratification – people designed like house paint mixes at the paint store.

Do you really think that God is going to cooperate with complete dehumanization?

Again, the hypothetical in this post is not improbable – within the last few years, scientists successfully grew an ear for transplantation to a person’s head on the back of a genetically-altered laboratory mouse.

trinity.edu/~mkearl/mouse-ear.jpg
 
I’d almost say that the human cloning would fail, due to the fact that we need God to begin human life.

If by some chance the cloned child is born there’s two things that could happen:
  1. It be animal-like in reasoning and behavior (maybe lack of soul?)
  2. The child would only take on the appearence of the person it was cloned as, but he/she has their own personality.
I hope there’ll never be any human cloning. How would the child feel if he/she were a clone? That could be unbearable! We just can’t play God!
 
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BibleReader:
Well, maybe an appropriate response would be a slightly more extreme hypothetical (where, neither the first one in Post #1, nor this one, are improbable).

Science becomes so advanced by the year 3,000 A.D. that human geneticists are easily able to create “Franken-baby,” from off-the-shelf DNA of, say, 2,500 contributing “beautiful people.” In other words, each clone is not even a twin, but a computer-designed composite of hundreds of different well-shaped, extremely-intelligent, ravishingly-handsome people, specially designed to have enormous food and sexual appetites with none of the down-sides of excessive self-gratification – people designed like house paint mixes at the paint store.

Do you really think that God is going to cooperate with complete dehumanization?
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Who are WE to tell God what to do?

What do we know about the mechanism of ensoulment that allows us to say an artificially-cloned human could not have a soul?
 
vern humphrey:
Who are WE to tell God what to do?

What do we know about the mechanism of ensoulment that allows us to say an artificially-cloned human could not have a soul?
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Hi, vern humphrey.

How’s this for an argument: Catholics will no longer be able to say that the year 3000 A.D. Finnaren & Haley female variety #297, with the exaggerated erogenous zones, inexhaustible sexual appetite, immunity to all known diseases, limitless desire to do tedious work and a hunger to please her male mate to the point of being his slave, is a descendent of Adam and Eve who has “inherited” the stain of Original Sin. She’ll be a “cake” out of a big vat.
 
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