Why Creation (Really) Matters for Thinking About Ethics

From gene editing to brain implants to multi-parent embryos, technologies that raise major questions for humanity’s future have been emerging at breakneck speed. Concerns abound that scientists are introducing these questions faster than ethicists can answer them. But what if in Scripture, the answers we need for ethically navigating the biotechnological revolution have been available all along?1

Genesis alone contains enough relevant insights to fill entire ethics books, with an especially central teaching being the doctrine of creatureliness.

Genesis alone contains enough relevant insights to fill entire ethics books, with an especially central teaching being the doctrine of creatureliness. This teaching states that humans are not self-creators but creatures in a given and good (although fallen) creation.2 The following discussion argues that this doctrine not only bears major ethical implications but also offers wisdom for approaching new biotechnological issues in ways that optimize human flourishing. Parts One and Two unpack the doctrine of creatureliness in contrast to evolutionary views. Part Three identifies the scientific, moral, and practical implications of this doctrine. Finally, Parts Four and Five apply the doctrine of creatureliness to ethically evaluate two areas of biotechnology: human enhancement and artificial reproduction.

Part One: The Biblical Doctrine of Creatureliness

Fundamentally, the word creatureliness implies the presence of three components: a Creator, a creature, and a context. So unpacking the doctrine of creatureliness requires surveying key theological truths about the nature of God, humans, and the wider created realm. To start with God’s nature, Genesis introduces God as the Creator. God’s creative activity took place “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1), underscoring that God himself has no beginning but is self-existent, eternal, and infinite. Since God created everything, nothing is outside of God’s power, presence, and knowledge.3 In other words, the Creator is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. He is also omnibenevolent.4 The fact that God could definitively call his creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31) reveals that his character is the foundation, source, and standard of all goodness, including moral goodness. Later Scriptures unpack further details of how creation reveals God’s character, declaring the glory of the One who is all-wise, all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving.5 God’s divine attributes assure us that he, in his infinite wisdom, knows and does what is best, all things considered, with the good of his creation in mind.

This God fashioned Adam and Eve in his own image and gave them “dominion” over the earth (Genesis 1:26–27). People are therefore part of creation yet also set apart from it. A human is not simply an animal or an organic machine but an “ensouled body or embodied soul” designed for relationship with God and others.6 Humans are also not limitless self-creators but finite creatures. We belong to, depend on, and are morally accountable to our Creator. So, as various theologians have pointed out, we do not possess absolute ownership rights over our bodies, lives, offspring, or the rest of creation to use however we want.7 Later scriptural passages emphasize this point. For instance, Moses’ Deuteronomy 10:13 mandate for Israel “to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord” appeared in the context of God’s ownership of creation: “Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it” (10:14).8 Because God owns creation, creatures can (and must) only enjoy God’s property on God’s terms. These terms apply to our redeemed bodies as well, which 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 clarifies are God’s temples and do not belong to us.

While God graciously entrusts us with the ability to utilize his gifts, we can only do so well by staying within the boundaries God wisely designed.9 Accordingly, God granted Adam and Eve considerable freedom with only one boundary: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:16–17). Moral limitations, by reflecting God’s good character and upholding his good designs, fittingly belonged in God’s good creation.10 Such limitations let us enjoy maximal freedom, analogous to the freedom a train enjoys by remaining on its tracks.

As contingent creatures in a universe we did not create, humans have not only moral limitations but also material limitations. We are physical creatures subject to physical laws. So we are not omnipresent. Even with technologies that expand the scope of realities with which we interact, our bodies locate us finitely in time and space. We are also not omnipotent. Natural constraints limit our abilities to manipulate anything but tiny fragments of an unfathomably vast universe. Neither are we omniscient. Apart from revelation, our knowledge is limited to what our senses perceive. We cannot prove these senses are dependable without circularly depending on them, nor can we know how much of reality they perceive.11 In sum, our creatureliness means we are not God.

What does all this mean for understanding the wider creation? Foundationally, if we know creation is the good product of a good Creator, then we know natural designs (apart from the influence of the fall) exist as they do for good reasons. Design implies teleology, or purpose. We see such purposefulness in how God made an orderly creation with clear boundaries between light and darkness, earth and sky, land and water, humans and animals, male and female, and—above all—Creator and creation.12 This creation needed no further perfection, for Genesis 2:1–3 clarifies that God completed creation in six days and then rested from his finished work. Biblical commentators Carl Keil and Franz Delitzsch note that the grammar of this text connotes “the actual completion” of creation, sealed in God’s acts of ceasing from his creative work and blessing the Sabbath.13

These premises that God created an orderly, completed, “purpose-full” creation and declared it “very good” engender a mimetic rather than poietic view of reality. As Carl Trueman aptly explains, a mimetic view “regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning”; in contrast, a poietic view “sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.”14 While a poietic view presumes human nature is open-ended—something we can reimagine, redefine, and recreate—a mimetic view sees our created nature as given, good, and therefore normative. Our human-wide and individual-specific traits exist for good reasons, allowing us to fulfill our human and individual vocations.15 So we can only flourish by working with rather than against God’s designs.16

Adam and Eve were the first to learn these lessons the hard way. Genesis records how Satan lured Eve to taste the only off-limits fruit, saying, “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Satan implied that Eve’s nature was not perfectly good as God had created it but could be improved if Eve stepped outside the one boundary God had given. Eve, conceding “the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6), shared the fruit with Adam. She and Adam could have enjoyed furthering their wisdom and knowledge within God’s designs. They could have applied their God-given curiosity to learn about the rest of creation, sampling every other fruit that existed. Instead, they were the first to, in one theologian’s words, “desire good things badly,” seeking to gain an advantage by transgressing God’s creational boundaries.17 When we revolt against our Creator, we revolt against our defining creatureliness and thereby revolt against ourselves as the embodied, contingent, relational beings we are.18 Ever since Eden, this strategy has drastically backfired.

As a result of human rebellion, creation is no longer perfectly good but has been corrupted with effects including evil, death, and suffering.

As a result of human rebellion, creation is no longer perfectly good but has been corrupted with effects including evil, death, and suffering. Yet God did not leave creation without hope. In promising that a descendant of Eve would one day defeat Satan, Genesis 3:15 pointed toward Jesus. As the Creator who took on human flesh, Jesus paid sin’s death penalty so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Jesus, not our own inventiveness, will usher in a renewed creation without evil, death, or suffering. Meanwhile, we can reflect Jesus’ love by seeking to mitigate the effects of the fall while taking care not to mirror the causes of the fall.19 We must not let pride, discontentment, covetousness, ingratitude, idolatry, selfish ambition, or other sins motivate our actions. We must not pursue noble visions in ways that overstep the moral or creational boundaries God gave us. And we must not forget our finite creatureliness by inappropriately desiring to “be like God.”

Part Two: Alternative Doctrines of Self-Creation

Contrary to the biblical doctrine of creatureliness, false doctrines of self-creation adopt a poietic view of humanity. In their contemporary form, these doctrines typically presuppose that humans arose through ongoing evolutionary processes that humans can further direct. Theistic versions of these claims say God created via evolution, while atheistic versions say humans evolved naturalistically. In both cases, evolutionary beliefs engender five significant conclusions. First, if humans evolved from nonhumans, then humans are continuous with nature in a way that blurs certain boundaries between humans, animals, and machines.20 Second, the processes of suffering, disease, and death that drive natural selection have always been normal parts of life. Third, humans lack a static, given nature. Human nature is instead, in the words of one theistic evolutionary ethicist, “indeterminate, open-ended, [and] malleable.”21 Fourth, as we’ll see in more detail later, we cannot draw meaningful ethical boundaries between therapies and enhancements. Fifth, these conclusions together suggest that—apart from other ethical concerns such as safety, justice, and informed consent—we should be free to biotechnologically recreate ourselves or our offspring. For all these reasons, theologians who approach bioethics from an evolutionary perspective frequently either do not close the door on enhancement biotechnologies or openly argue that we must become “co-creators with God” by controlling our evolution.22 However, the co-creator concept is neither strongly supported by Scripture nor consistent with the Bible’s invariable use of the Hebrew word create (בָּרָא, bārā') in reference to God alone.23

Along with these five conclusions common to evolutionary views, further consequences arise from a specifically atheistic perspective. If we evolved naturally, then we are not creatures but self-creators. We are not morally accountable to anyone higher than ourselves. We are not body-soul unities, but biological machines whose embodied hardware and psychological software are reduced to physics and chemistry.24 As Christian author Nancy Pearcy argues, these evolutionary ideas let us erase any meaningful connections between the biological facts of our hardware and the psychological values of our software.25 If God did not create us to be soul-body unities fashioned in specific ways for specific reasons, then we can freely act upon our hardware however our software dictates. Camille Paglia, a vocally atheistic scholar, captured this view by declaring, “Fate, not God, has given us this flesh. We have absolute claim to our bodies and may do with them as we see fit.”26

To say that our software has the right to determine our hardware is to say that internal feelings matter more than external facts. Feelings must be the ultimate standard for truth. By this logic, individuals should look within themselves to determine their own truth and then freely make choices that recreate physical reality based on that truth. Such thinking characterizes the mindset called expressive individualism.27 This mindset not only devalues the body but also objectifies the most vulnerable humans. Whether preborn, disabled, elderly, or comatose, people who cannot currently make choices in line with their feelings become prey for the utilitarian benefit of people who can express their own values.28

Part Three: Implications of the Doctrine of Creatureliness

Various authors have described how practices including abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, transhumanism, gender-reassignment surgeries, and the destruction of embryos for artificial reproduction flow from such secular thinking.29 All these practices befit the belief that humans are self-creators with the absolute right to control their hardware (or their children’s hardware) in line with their own software. This reality underscores the high stakes involved in accepting or rejecting our creatureliness, raising implications for science, society, and morality.

On a scientific level, the doctrine of creatureliness would suggest that apart from the fall’s influence, biological realities are already optimally designed for creaturely flourishing. Given God’s omnibenevolence and creation’s original perfection, we can expect to find optimized designs throughout nature despite creation’s fallenness. This prediction matches scientific observations.30 For example, evolutionists investigating the standard genetic code (SGC) concluded in 2019, “The optimality of the SGC is a robust feature and cannot be explained by any simple evolutionary hypothesis proposed so far.”31 Likewise, the net harmfulness of most mutations confirms that our genes are optimally designed.32 Geneticist John Sanford notes that because genes contain numerous layers of information, mutations that cause improvements on one level generally damage other levels.33 Such realities remind us that an all-knowing Creator designed our genes as they are (notwithstanding the effects of the fall) for good reasons. Humbly recognizing this truth should give us pause before we attempt to enhance our genes or our offspring’s genes. Thus, we can already glimpse certain bioethical implications that flow from approaching science through the lens of creatureliness.

These implications also reach into social contexts. If the doctrine of creatureliness is correct, then working with (or against) our Creator’s designs enables flourishing (or causes harm) on individual, familial, and societal levels.34 Pearcy notes that for individuals, Christianity is a body-affirming worldview that lets us truly be ourselves in the bodies we have been given.35 Likewise for families, the doctrine of creatureliness regards our children and their bodies as gifts belonging to God. This perspective, as Christian bioethicists frequently observe, engenders healthy families characterized by loving acceptance.36 Pearcey notes that conversely, if children are not gifts belonging to God, then they ultimately belong to the state. In fact, the state can assume the right to determine other aspects of embodied familial life by redefining marriage, gender, and parenthood. Pearcey explains that “in each case, the state has taken the postmodern approach of dismissing natural realities and substituting legal fiat. It refuses to be held in check by respect for the created world.”37 Clearly, the doctrine of creatureliness matters for societies.

Along with bearing these social implications, the doctrine of creatureliness raises moral implications by illuminating essential virtues and principles for navigating the biotechnological revolution. For example, reflecting on this doctrine’s teachings about God’s nature, our nature, and creation’s nature fosters an attitude of humble, contented thanksgiving. Scripture itself mandates the virtues of humility, gratitude, and contentment, which various ethicists have also defended for approaching biotechnology.38 Humility corresponds to our recognition that our loving, all-knowing Creator designed us (and our offspring) the way he did for excellent reasons which we, in our finitude, may not understand. Contentment and gratitude, meanwhile, entail resting in thankfulness for God’s creational designs rather than lusting, as Adam and Eve evidently did, for something “other” or “more.” Humble, grateful contentedness lets us view biotechnology not as the key to our self-creation, but as a tool “to live out the humanly full span of life within the edifying limits and constraints of humanity’s grasp,” as the President’s Council for Bioethics suggested.39 Importantly, the need for these virtues does not preclude us from applying our God-given creativity, curiosity, and inventiveness to cultivate creation, improve our lives, or mitigate the effects of the fall. We simply must do so within the moral and creational boundaries God gave us. To reject these boundaries, as one Christian ethicist put it, is to “follow the path to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and to act against our own nature as creatures.40

These considerations give rise to a key principle: We must apply biotechnologies in ways that mitigate the fall’s effects rather than mirror the fall’s cause.41 We rightly seek to love others by alleviating pain, suffering, and other forms of physical corruption. But this quest must not reflect sins of hubris, covetousness, complaining, selfish ambition, idolatry, ingratitude, disobedience, rejection of God’s authority, or other possible factors in humanity’s fall. We must also remember that our efforts cannot defeat the fall’s effects; that victory belongs to Jesus alone.

We must apply biotechnologies in ways that mitigate the fall’s effects rather than mirror the fall’s cause.

Part Four: Applying the Doctrine of Creatureliness to Human Enhancement

Having considered the scientific, social, and moral implications of our creatureliness, we can examine how these considerations apply to navigating two bioethical issues: human enhancement and artificial reproduction. Regarding enhancement, a few preliminary definitions are in order.42 Enhancements are biotechnological interventions (such as gene editing, brain implants, or other forms of “biohacking”) intended to surpass “healthy” or “normal” biological states. Therapies, in contrast, are interventions intended to preserve or restore such states. Notably though, defining “healthy” and “normal” can pose trouble for two reasons. First, critics may argue that these definitions can be perceived as devaluing anyone who is not able-bodied.43 However, the point that all humans have priceless worth as God’s image bearers leaves no room for such devaluations. Second, the lines between health vs. disease may in some cases be unclear or culturally relative. But the fact that a line between two concepts may blur in places does not mean we should erase the line altogether.44 The medical profession can generally function in a meaningful way because the concepts of health versus disease are generally functional and meaningful. To that extent, we can recognize “normal” states as “those which fall within the range of natural human variation without qualifying as diseased.”45

Now we can see why evolutionary views cannot draw meaningful boundaries between therapy and enhancement. Evolutionary views suggest that “normal” states are at best changeable statistical averages rather than given, good designs that optimally enable flourishing. If normalcy is open-ended and not teleologically meaningful and if diseases have always been part of life, then enhancements and therapies are morally comparable because they both seek only to transcend unwanted natural states.46 In contrast, the doctrine of creatureliness affirms “normal” states as reflecting God’s given, good, purposeful designs which enable us to flourish as the creatures we are. This doctrine also lets us recognize diseases overall (definitionally blurry instances aside) as problems that hinder such flourishing and represent the effects of the fall. So creatureliness provides a basis for understanding and preserving normalcy and for distinguishing between therapy and enhancement. As noted earlier, this doctrine also supplies the principle that we must mitigate the effects of the fall without mirroring the cause of the fall. Therapies, by this thinking, are ethically valid to the extent they mitigate the fall’s effects. But enhancements are morally dubious to the extent they mirror the fall’s cause, including by reflecting discontentment, hubris, covetousness, a lost sense of creatureliness, or inappropriate desires to “be like God.”

Even if we could pursue enhancements without these immoral motives, the doctrine of creatureliness reminds us that such attempts are likely unwise. Because God is all-knowing, all-good, and designed us as he did for excellent reasons, we are mistaken, prideful, and deceived to presume we can improve God’s designs. We may reasonably predict that our attempts to enhance ourselves on one level would—like genetic mutations—cause unintended trade-offs elsewhere.

Importantly, the conclusion that enhancements are both inappropriate and unwise does not preclude us from technologically “enhancing” various capacities in transient ways that do not breach God-ordained ethical, moral, or creational boundaries. This point raises the distinction between tools and ontological modifications, which are attempts to alter something’s essential nature.47 Tools including smartphones, airplanes, and virtual reality wearables temporarily augment our capacities or perceptions as we interact with them, even as we remain the finite human creatures we are.48 Ontological modifications, in contrast, are interventions intended to transform humanity into something posthuman—say, a hive mind of immortal, disembodied, telepathic cyborgs who can mentally manipulate reality.

We can find examples of initiatives to technologically evolve humanity into beings other than we are within the movements known as transhumanism or posthumanism.49 Certain transhumanist aspirations—including desires for greater knowledge, no disease, and no death—reflect our eternal nature and longing for a new creation.50 These longings are not necessarily wrong, but we are wrong to pursue them in ways that transgress God-given boundaries, mirror the fall’s causes, or exhibit the delusion that we can save ourselves. Like Adam and Eve, we would find that to “desire good things badly” inevitably backfires.51 Contrary to transhumanist aspirations, the doctrine of creatureliness affirms that we will enjoy optimal freedom and flourishing by working within rather than against the creaturely contexts God gave us.52 Thus, this doctrine lets us affirm therapies and tools (but not enhancements or posthumanism) to the extent they help us thrive within God-ordained moral, ethical, and creational boundaries as the kind of creatures we are.

Part Five: Applying the Doctrine of Creatureliness to Artificial Reproduction

One of our God-ordained creaturely contexts is parenthood, which raises the matter of artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs). ARTs are reproduction-oriented biotechnologies that “intervene in the beginnings of human life, especially life initiated outside the body, whether in the clinic or in the laboratory.”53 An especially prominent ART is “in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer” (IVF-ET), where embryonic humans created in a laboratory are transferred to a mother’s womb for gestation. This process can coincide with various other ARTs such as prenatal genetic screening, germ line editing, and cloning. Purposes for using ARTs can range anywhere from conducting scientific research to overcoming infertility to engineering “designer babies.” ARTs entail multiple ethical implications that can vary by the specific purposes, motivations, circumstances, techniques, and outcomes involved.54 While unpacking these specifics surpasses the scope of this discussion, the doctrine of creatureliness immediately clarifies several conclusions.

First, this doctrine affirms that children are creatures made in God’s image, prohibiting the use of ARTs in ways that destroy, harm, or otherwise endanger human embryos. Second, the doctrine of creatureliness affirms that children are gifts from our perfect Creator. Every child, with all his or her traits (effects of the fall notwithstanding), belongs to God as part of his given and good creation. Parents do not own their children’s bodies and do not have absolute rights to them. These realities preclude using ARTs in ways that commoditize children as biological machines whose “hardware” parents can customize to suit the values of their own “software.” Third, the doctrine of creatureliness affirms the morally normative nature of God’s creational paradigm for marriage and parenthood: one man and one woman in a one-flesh relationship (Genesis 2:24, c.f. Matthew 19:4–5). Christians contemplating any specific usage of ARTs must therefore consider whether this usage inappropriately crosses the boundaries inherent in this creational paradigm.55 Altogether, the doctrine of creatureliness requires pursuing the human vocation to “be fruitful and multiply” only within the boundaries our Creator set and only in accordance with the creatureliness of ourselves and our offspring.

Conclusion

God grants us considerable freedom, but we will only flourish optimally as creatures when we enjoy God’s property on God’s terms.

As the examples of enhancement and ARTs illustrate, answers for navigating today’s biotechnological revolution have been available all along in the biblical doctrine of creatureliness. This doctrine highlights key truths about God, humanity, and creation, revealing that we are finite image bearers accountable to an all-wise Creator who established a given, good, orderly creation. God grants us considerable freedom, but we will only flourish optimally as creatures when we enjoy God’s property on God’s terms. Therefore, we must apply novel biotechnologies in ways that befit our nature as embodied, finite, accountable creatures rather than seeking to technologically self-create ourselves or our offspring. By working with rather than against God’s creational designs, we can embrace the gift of living as the creatures we are.