In addition, many Muslims believe that life does not begin until a foetus is 14 days old, so as many scientific experiments occur before the fourteen day point is reached, and therefore as long as the embryo is destroyed before this point, they would not consider it abortion. Lots of the people who oppose the statement accept genetic engineering as long as it is not used to create “perfect people”, this, they believe, is a step too far.
Despite the fact that genetic engineering is a revolutionary scientific breakthrough that holds much potential, it is also a treatment surrounded in a great deal of mystery and suspicion. Unlike other scientific techniques which have a far more predictable long term outcome, the long-term consequences of genetic engineering are unknown. Whilst having much positive potential, genetic engineering also has the potential to create a situation where people are seeking to create ‘perfect people’ or ‘designer babies’ with embryos being altered to find a specific gene in order to create a baby that may look a particular way or may have certain characteristics.
Trying to create a perfect earth with perfect people is wrong in religious teaching of all faiths; only heaven is perfect and we are all God’s children, loved by him equally, no matter what we look like, whether we are intelligent or not and irrespective of any genetic abnormalities people may have. Furthermore the consequences of genetic engineering cannot be reversed; when an embryo is destroyed the life ends at that point, it cannot be restored; this irreversible destruction of human life is equal to abortion for many religious people and abortion is considered a great sin. This is because life begins at the moment of conception and is considered holy, sacred and in God’s gift alone as shown in Deuteronomy 32:39: “It is I who bring both death and life”. Many Muslims share this view, rejecting the argument that life only begins when a foetus is 14 days old and believing that genetic engineering does involve abortion.
Lastly, Christian teaching suggests that God created humans in the image of himself; he is the creator and Father of all mankind and to try to interfere with his creation is a sinful, an attempt by humans to ‘play God’ in fact. Christian’s believe that God is our only father and therefore it is our role to love him, and his creation. Whilst it is important to find cures for diseases and we are always taught that we must do unto others what we want others to do unto us, our love of God for this Christian thinking, best exemplified by the teachings of the Roman Catholic church, must come first. To usurp his role is wrong, God and God alone has the right to interfere with our genes.
In conclusion the problem is to what extent can humans interfere with what God is supposed to have created? If you take the view of progressive believers, the gift of intelligence has allowed mankind to develop an understanding of disease which has permitted the development of vaccines and penicillin which has greatly reduced the inevitability of disease being triumphant. However is this itself not an interference with ‘nature’? Is Smallpox not ‘natural’? Is Cholera not ‘natural’? If it is deemed morally correct to tackle these problems with science, why should it be problematic to weed out genes that create a predisposition to Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s? The distinction seems to lie in that by developing genetic engineering, you may start a process which will result in a march towards an abuse of human interference in genetics, which can result in a distortion of humanity by itself, altering us from man created in Gods image, to man created in its own image. Humanity has made great progress, but its understanding of the balance of factors which make up all natural life is still very limited, could interference in human or plant genetics result in a domino effect, unforeseen by man who creates a huge amount of previously unenvisaged problems? If genetic engineering is permitted it must be in the context of a thorough and binding moral and legal framework which prevents such tinkering with what is the hugely complex interconnected nature of all life on earth.
