The Keene Lectures 2004

'What will the world be like in 2020?'

Lecture Four:

Wednesday 24^th November 2004

'Hard Choices'

delivered by Dr Robert Song

Senior Lecturer in Religion and Ethics,

University of Durham

What will the world be like in 2020?

The Keene Lectures 2004

This year we have been proud to host a series of lectures which were both expert and relevant to public interest and personal faith. Four speakers were invited to address the question 'What will the world be like in 2020?' from the perspective of their professional expertise: a futurologist, a theologian, an ecologist and an ethicist. In order of delivery, they were:

Mr Ian Pearson, Research Futurologist with British Telecom

The Rt Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool

Professor David Goode, Adviser on the Environment to the Greater London Council

Dr Robert Song, Senior Lecturer in Ethics, University of Durham

The result was an array of daunting scenarios, with few guarantees that life as we know it will continue or be sustainable in the long-term. These transcripts are offered to enable further reflection and to provide a cameo of our turn-of-the-century apprehensions. As Robert Song pointed out, the future is shaped by people like ourselves. Much depends on the clarity of our understanding and the courage of our response.

We are indeed grateful for the bequest in memory of John Henry Keene which provides for these public lectures to be offered free of charge.

Andrew Knowles

Canon Theologian

November 2004

KEENE LECTURE FOUR

Wednesday 24^th November 2004

'Hard Choices'

Dr Robert Song

Robert Song is Senior Lecturer in Religion and Ethics at the University of Durham. He has published widely in the field of Christian ethics, including 'Human Genetics Fabricating the Future' published by Dartman, Longman and Todd in 2002.

I'm very grateful to you all for inviting me and hope that you can think through with me some of these very important issues; because the question of 2020 and what life will be like then, what kind of vision we should have for then, is a very important theme.

How are we now to think about the future? It is important for the Church. We've already faced as large changes in the last generation, in the last thirty years, as I suspect the Church has faced in the whole of the last millennium put together. And of course we've seen that in terms of the declining social significance of the Church in Britain and in Europe. The question is, how are we to be faithful in this coming generation? What does it mean to be Christian? What does it mean to be human in the face of massive technological change: change that will not only affect our environment but also our own bodies, our very selves as well.

I'm mainly going to talk about genetics and reproductive genetics – what is sometimes known as reprogenetics – I'm going to concentrate on those because those are the areas that I'm mainly familiar with. I gather you've heard about nanotechnology, you've heard about cybernetic issues; and I think the issues I'm going to talk about are closely connected with those.

It has to be said that even in genetics the prospects are awesome. We know that there are terrible diseases, which owe to single gene malfunctions, which one day may be treatable. Cystic fibrosis, Huntington's Disease, Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy, and a variety of others may one day receive good genetic treatment. Also, diseases which are not due just to genetic malfunction but which are a combination of genes and environment, such as certain cancers or certain kinds of heart disease, we may be able to treat as well, through, for example, what's called pharmacogenetics, pharmacogenomics – that is, individually tailoring special drugs to suit people's individual genetic make-ups. Selection of embryos is already happening to ensure that embryos are not implanted which have so-called 'bad' genes. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis means diagnosing the genetic make-up of particular embryos before they're implanted in the womb. All of these are either happening or are real possibilities.

Now, there certainly are problems with them. For example, there is no routine clinical gene therapy at the moment. Nevertheless, it is yet assumed that this is just a matter of time. It is not that the science itself or the medicine itself faces ultimate difficulties. And as we know, the possibilities do not stop there. The Human Genome Project announced in 2001 the complete sequence of the entire 3.1 billion base pairs that make up the human genome – as a result of that we're getting more insight into how we're made, into the nature of human behaviour. It may be that intelligence or sexuality, or disposition to aggression or violent behaviour, or all of these may well turn out to have a genetic component. And beyond that: designer babies, advances in artificial intelligence, advances in robotics, the integration of computer chips into the human brain, so that we can have increased memory, instantaneous virtual communication, networked consciousness, and so on. And all of that with the ultimate goal, perhaps the control of human evolution into what is sometimes called the post-human or the trans-humanist future.

Technology out of control?

What I want to concentrate on in this lecture is the sense of runaway technology behind this. Whether we love it or whether we fear it, I think we all share the sense that it is going to happen anyway. We face an apparently inescapable future: technology out of control. Even campaigners who gain a victory there or a moratorium here, sense that they do so against a rising tide. Like King Canute, they feel that the tide is rising and that they cannot order it to stop. And so we all get the constant sense that our morality cannot keep up with our technology. Our technical ingenuity outstrips and outpaces our own moral understanding. We try to draw a line in the sand but it is only a matter of time before the tide overturns it. And so we feel powerless in the face of the future. I don't want it, we may say. I never asked to be part of this. I don't want to be part of some network neural global consciousness. And yet the sense is, it is all going to happen anyway.

Who's behind this? Nothing happens unless someone pushes it. Perhaps it's mad scientists. Perhaps it's all those technological people who read too much science fiction. Perhaps it's greedy multinational corporations. Perhaps Bill Gates has some special laboratory which is looking into all this. Perhaps BT is doing it. Who knows? So who's behind it? Are the scientists, or the corporations, and if not them, who? My answer is this: that we are behind it, each one of us insofar as our desires have been formed by modern Western culture. In other words, what we're looking at in all this talk about futurology and what may happen in the future is not superficial, it's not something which has just grown up in the last 10 or 20 years. It actually goes right to the heart of our deepest commitments in modern Western culture.

The Baconian Project

The cyborg future, the robot future, the nanotech future, the genetic engineering future is just a continuation of things to which modern, Western culture is already committed. What if modern Western culture contains within it a kind of structural flaw which contains perhaps at an extreme the seeds of its own destruction? Modern culture is committed to a project which infiltrates every part of our lives. That project, which I think touches us at every moment of the day from morning to night, we might call the technological project or, as I prefer, for reasons that will become clear in a moment, we might call it the Baconian project. Now this project, which I think works right through each one of us, not outside us, not just the corporations, not just the scientists, is something which we find rather attractive. It is a project which has two elements – the element first of all of eliminating suffering: not coming to terms with suffering, learning to accept it and learning to deal with it, but eliminating it. It's also the project, secondly, of maximising the realm of human choice; that is, maximising our individual autonomy over every part of our lives. Eliminating suffering and maximising the realm of human choice. And the point of it, is to release the human condition from the bounds, from the bonds, of necessity; to release us as human beings from everything that holds us down, that ties us to the environment, that ties us to the world, that ties us to our very own given bodies. And the technological project achieves this by the technological control of nature. We treat nature as raw material to be exploited, something which we can treat instrumentally to suit our own purposes, and that nature, I suggest, includes our own bodies.

Where does this project come from? It is, I think, not something that has happened in the last few years. All the speculations about the future that we have are born from something much older. In fact I would want to trace its origins back to the 17^th century and even behind that to the high Middle Ages. The figure in particular that I want to draw attention to is Francis Bacon, a great 17^th century statesman, diplomat, thinker and literary writer, but for our purposes most importantly, a philosopher of science - trying to indicate what science is and how it might best proceed. Most modern scientists would actually date much of their own fundamental method at its deepest philosophical level to Francis Bacon.

For our purposes Bacon said two important things: first of all, he said that science wasn't just a matter of speculation or abstract thinking about the world out there. Science always had to be useful. It had to have some particular social benefit. He talked about the need for science to express benevolence, the relief of suffering, and drew on the Christian notion of loving your neighbour. I think myself that that is a good and Christian thing, something we should endorse. Science has to have some point, it has to be useful. But mixed in with that Bacon also had another conception, and that's what's known as the new science of Nature. He had a number of images that truthfully were rather violent towards Nature: the notion that we should torture Nature, to make nature give up her secrets. In fact he often used imagery that suggests sexual violence. He talks about raping nature so that we can understand what it is about. Nature is there for human benefit and not for anything else. And it's for that reason, that kind of underlying idea that I call this modern, technological project the Baconian Project. If I was in an academic setting I'd want to nuance that and give further details and so on, but for our purposes that will do.

Utilitarians, Deists and Romanticism

The influence of Bacon and this new understanding of science is one strand in what has come to make up modern technological inevitability, or the sense of it. But there are other strands. In the 18^th century we find the radical Utilitarians, people like Jeremy Bentham, saying that the human good is to be understood in terms of maximising pleasure and minimising pain. In other words, identifying the good not in terms of obedience to divine command or other understandings of human good, but very narrowly, what will maximise pleasure and what will minimise pain. And so the Utilitarians emphasise the relief of suffering and this has become part of the modern world.

In the 18^th century also, modern culture has been influenced by Deists. Deists were a kind of Christian who said that God is not actively involved in a day-to-day way in the workings of the world. Providence, how God is involved in a day-to-day way in the world, is something we should not consider. They compared God instead to being like a clock-maker who winds up the clock and then lets it go off by itself; a mechanistic view of the world in which God is not directly involved. One of the implications of that is that when we suffer, there's no point in trying to look for God's purpose in it. When we suffer it is just meaningless and therefore we can do anything we like to get rid of suffering, and I think that sense has remained with us to this century.

From the 19^th century we get one other important influence, and that is the influence of Romanticism, the movement which was particularly influential in Germany, but also known in Britain through people like William Wordsworth: the love of Nature and so on. Romantics talked about the importance of individual fulfilment, the importance of us as individuals finding our own essential identity in our inner authenticity. Emotional truthfulness is what is important about us. When, in Hamlet, Polonius says to Hamlet: 'Above all else, to thine own self be true,' he was expressing something which was very close to the romantic heart, the idea that individual authenticity is something that we need to value very profoundly.

A new conception of medicine

Now all of these influences – Bacon and his understanding of science, Utilitarians and their understanding of minimising pain, the Deists and their understanding of not needing to find any meaning in suffering, and the Romantics – all of them, I think, have contributed to our modern understanding of ourselves and also our understanding of medicine. I think we have a new conception of medicine. It's not completely dominant by any means, but it certainly is there in our culture. According to this, medicine is not just about therapy for body and mind, not just about healing, whether physical or mental. Medicine is also becoming a response to a set of consumer demands, so that the doctor is there not just to put you right, but to respond to your demands as you see them. If you like, medicine is becoming the process of eliminating the burdens of finitude, eliminating those things that weigh down on us and keep us from our true selves as free beings. And I think in this new kind of understanding of medicine, there are several characteristic features that you would not have found in traditional medicine. One of them is this: that we interpret all suffering as pointless. We can't see that there is any intrinsic value in suffering at all. I'm not, I should make very clear, praising suffering and saying that it is a good thing. Christians all believe that one day 'sorrow and sighing will flee away.'¹ But to say that suffering is completely pointless is not part of what traditional medicine held. With that comes the temptation to eliminate suffering at all costs, even if that also involves eliminating the sufferer.

That's one feature of modern medicine. Another is this: the marginalisation of incurable medical disorders. That is, those medical disorders which modern medicine can't yet cure, tend to be put to one side. Think of mental illness and the way that is prioritised or otherwise in many modern health services.

A third feature of modern medicine, which I think comes out of this technological project, is prioritising cure over care. Medicine becomes not the task of caring, in which cure hopefully will find a place, but rather it becomes a task of curing, and if you can't cure, then too bad. And so we've experienced the downgrading of those professions whose job is primarily to care. Nurses are in all hospital hierarchies inferior to doctors, and yet many surveys show that whether people feel happy with their hospital treatment turns not on whether the treatment was successful but whether or not they felt cared for. Equally, we find in many modern systems the outcasting of dying patients. If medicine can do nothing more for you, you are put on the margins, and the hospice movement has worked very courageously and very hard to try and meet that.

The fourth feature of modern medicine is this: the increasing number of human desires which medicine is expected to satisfy. The multiplication of the individual preferences that we might go to the doctor to find a cure for is sometimes called the medicalisation of human life. If you don't believe me, let me just say the one word: Viagra.

The fifth result of modern technological medicine is the increasing understanding of our human bodies as something which can be manipulated in accordance with tastes and desires; and let me point you in the direction of cosmetic surgery. Last year Americans sought 32% more cosmetic operations than they had done in the previous year. It is far and away the fastest-growing area of medicine, if indeed you could call it an area of medicine; and it is coming to this country as well. I should make clear I am not getting into the rights and wrongs of cosmetic surgery, which is a much bigger issue. I'm just pointing out that this is a feature of how we as modern people relate to our bodies. Is there something you don't like about how you look? Well, we can change it. That is how we are beginning to think. All of these features that I've just mentioned of modern, technological medicine, are part of an overall mindset and I think that overall mindset is deep in modern Western culture: the idea that we can control Nature so as to eliminate suffering and maximise personal autonomy.

A surrogate salvation

How are we to respond to all this? What should we do? What should we think? In my view what we're facing is actually a form of salvation. We're facing a kind of surrogate theology. We're facing a different theology from the theology that we're given in the Christian tradition. Creation, for example, is in this theology not the place that God declared to be good (Genesis 1:31). It is not the place for living that we have, but just raw material to be exploited. Human beings are not regarded as the Bible regards them, as unities of body and soul, as embodied souls or ensouled bodies. Human beings on this view are just wills, who can manipulate their own bodies as they choose. In this new theology, salvation is not about being freed from our own self-centredness and our greed, so that we can love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. Salvation becomes the use of technology to escape our physical bodily fate. And eschatology – by which I mean our understanding of the future in the light of God – eschatology is not resurrection life, so that we die and one day are raised again to God's new kingdom. Eschatology is instead the perpetuation of this life, this worldly life, one which will be free from suffering and perhaps free from mortality.

It's not surprising in this view that research into prolonging life, so-called life extension technologies, should be so significant. It's exactly what we should expect: if you've got no hope for resurrection, you want to make this life go on as long as possible. It's not surprising that we use statements such as that those under 30 need not expect to die. Personally I'm always a little bit concerned that the date they give is always just a bit younger than I am myself, but that's the way it seems to be! It is, nevertheless, a religion in which we are all caught up. It's not just scientists and technologists and doctors and people 'out there'. It is actually something in which all of us are involved as consumers and just as modern people.

All this is particularly difficult to understand because technology has done so much good. I personally am a child of the last third of the 20^th century, and I cannot conceive what it is like to live in a world without anaesthetics, or antibiotics, or so many things that we take for granted in modern medicine. Being able to choose and alleviating suffering - let us get this right - are good things. They are good things, but the problem is when they become on the one hand radical individualistic autonomy and on the other hand the denial of our human finitude, that we are people who will suffer and will die.

No easy answers

How are we going to extricate ourselves from all of this? I'm not going to pretend there are easy answers. It would be massively too glib to say that. After all, we're talking about a whole way of thinking and a whole way of being in the world. It is something which goes right through us. As Solzhenitzyn discovered, when he turned from being a Marxist, a Stalinist, as he was in his youth, to being someone who had a much more subtle understanding of human nature, he realised that evil and sin are not just 'out there' in other people or in institutions. The line between good and evil runs right through each one of us. When we're talking about technology in the way that I've talked about it, we're talking about something where the good and the perilously idolatrous perhaps run very close to each other. Nevertheless, we must not give up hope. After all, we're Christians, and Christians believe in the resurrection. As someone once described the resurrection to me: it is a bit like being up Ship Creek but realising you still have a paddle. With the resurrection, Christians are free to live in the power of the Spirit, and the Spirit is a spirit that helps us to discern the right from the wrong.

What I want to do in the rest of this talk is to give you three values that might help us discern right from wrong in this area.

Three values

1. The first value is the value of medicine. Now I want to start off here because too often people who are sceptical or critical of modern technology can seem to be opposed to it as a whole. They can look like Luddites. I want to say: No, the Church has always had a commitment to medicine and to health and healing. From the earliest days the Church taught that God is a God who heals, whether through miracles, through the laying-on of hands for healing, or in the practice of medicine through doctors and nurses. God is a God who heals. The work of healing is a part of the work of the restoration of creation. It goes right back to Jesus. In Luke's gospel we hear: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to proclaim recovery of sight to the blind.'² Healing is part of what God's kingdom is about. And elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus goes around preaching the Word and healing the sick. In other words, it is right that the Church is committed to healing and medicine.

What might this mean in practice? Well, gene therapies, I think, will often be good. For example, cystic fibrosis is a disease which affects the lung lining, and there have been trials that you can have a kind of nasal spray, like an asthma inhaler, which will plant the right gene in the lung lining. Now, for various reasons these trials didn't work out, but I think those are things that we ought to applaud. Genetically modifying viruses, so that they can be used to target cancer cells, is again something which I think is a good. In that sense gene therapy is a continuation of the cancer treatments that we have at the moment – radiotherapy, surgery, chemotherapy and so on. Similarly, pharmacogenetics, I think, could be a good. For many drugs now, the take-up – that is, the success rate for them – is often, for the ones that get to the market, between 20% and 50%. A very good one will have a 50% success rate for the disease it is trying to get at.

While there are different reasons given for differing levels of success, particularly with drugs, it seems one of the largest single reasons is people's individual genetic make-up. It could be that we can tailor drugs to suit the needs of individuals, and maybe as soon as 10 or 15 years – estimates differ – that you'll go to a GP's surgery and check your own genetic profile against the chit that is provided with the medicine. If it goes green then you can take the medicine; if it says red, then it will be valueless. So that's another area I think that could be good.

Miniature transmitters to enable those with degenerative brain conditions to communicate, I think could be a genuine good; so too with new nanotechnologies, which will enable us to target genetic mutations. All of these are potentially very good and I think we should applaud them and not worry that this is modern genetic technology and therefore be wary. I think there are many things which are potentially really good.

2. The second value is the value of embodiment. We all have bodies. We're not merely souls, or free-floating consciousnesses, we all are embodied and our bodies are, or at least should be, valuable to us. This is part of the theme of the goodness of creation. God looked at what he'd made and saw that it was good. One of the earliest heresies that Christians faced was that of Gnosticism. Gnosticism held, in some of its varieties, that Jesus didn't come in the flesh. Jesus only came as a spiritual being and only seemed to be a human being. And so Gnostics held that the material world, the physical world, is not really spiritually significant, and that the body itself is evil. Glen Hoddle, the former England football manager, said, 'My body is just a raincoat. I can take it off when I die, when I'll be a pure spirit again.' Now whatever that is, it is certainly not Christian theology. The idea that we are being redeemed from creation and not that creation itself is being redeemed, the idea that there is a redemption from creation and not redemption of creation, is not something which Christians can go with. Early Christians said by contrast that this world, the material world, is good. Yes, it's fallen, but even though it is fallen it is not something to escape from. So we say in our creeds: 'I believe in the resurrection of the body.' We don't believe in the immortality of the soul only. Jesus came in the flesh.

You may say, this is an ancient heresy which is nothing to do with us. Well, let's think. Designer babies – babies selected for athletic prowess, or musical ability, or intelligence, or beauty – might these be ways of trying to escape our humanity? Is the human body something which we should try to improve on, or is it something we should broadly accept as it is? What about the desire for human perfection that is often behind some people's hopes for genetic research? Talking to clinical geneticists, they say that they hear the phrase 'I want a perfect baby' quite often. What about the desire to discover the biological basis of ageing? What do such hopes tell us about our attitudes to mortality and our attitudes to human finitude? Is all of this about helping us to face up to our limitations, or is it about trying to escape them? For Christians it may be that the ancient quarrel of Gnosticism has some surprisingly modern implications.

3. My third and final value is: the value of justice and equal humanity. In the Creed, Christians proclaim that Jesus Christ was 'begotten not made'. What did the Church Fathers mean by this peculiar phrase? I think what they were saying is something like this: Christ is radically equal to the Father, and something that is made can never be radically equal to its maker. Something that is made can never have the same status as the person who made it. For human beings, if we make something it can never be our equal, whether that thing we make is a motor car, a cake, a poem, or a computer programme. And similarly, Christ is fully divine. Christ was not 'made' by the Father but 'begotten'. Our children, by contrast with things we make, are people that are fully equal with us. And that raises a question: when do children become manufactured products, rather than fully equal human beings in their own right? I think that's always been a concern that has underlain Christian thinking about new reproductive technologies, IVF and so on. Typically, Christians have wanted to distinguish between using technology to assist procreation and using technology to replace procreation. But it's also a further question: would cloning children be a form of treating them instrumentally? Would it be a way of turning them into commodities? As one ethicist has put it: What would happen if we weren't happy with a child produced like this? Would we take them back to the manufacturers, would we ask for a refund or a discount? When you see fertility clinics being sued, as is now happening, because the child they gave wasn't quite the right one, are we seeing exactly some of that mentality? Are we not in danger of denying the equal humanity of our children?

Back in the real world …

We are turning human beings into cyborgs, in a world where people are dying of diarrhoea and TB, which can be cured at 20p a shot. Over 80% of the world's medical research money is addressed to problems and to diseases which carry only 20% of the world's disease burden. Malaria has just in the last few weeks had a possible vaccine announced, far, far too late, one might say, for a disease that has ravaged many parts of the world; but of course not the rich parts of the world, and so rich countries have not given their attention to it. It is only when a medical charity (and, to give credit where it is due, the Bill Gates Foundation) put a lot of money into it looking for a vaccine, was one finally found. All this talk about what is going to happen in the future has to take place against the stark reality of the actual world in which we live, a world in which 200,000 or 250,000 children under five die of starvation or of easily-preventable illness every week. One of the dangers of a lot of this technological discourse, one of the mystifications it has, is that it prevents us from seeing that reality.

I've talked about the Baconian Project, the technological project which I think infiltrates all of us, and I've tried to give three values that might help us discern what is good and what is questionable about them. That task of discernment and what we do in practice as a result is a daunting task. As the old Chinese saying has it, however: 'The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.' The apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:58, 'Because of the resurrection, you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.' We don't have to despair in the face of the future. It is God's future.

QUESTIONS:

Jonathan Hopcraft: Is there any institution, scientific or religious or otherwise, where people consider together the salvation of medical treatment of individuals with the total treatment of the earth? It seems so tragic that we have wonderful developments for individual life, the possibility of individuals living much more healthy and lengthy lives, while at the same time other children and peoples are suffering very much from simple diseases such as you have described, and also the earth itself is becoming less habitable with all these very healthy people multiplying within it. Is there anywhere where these two concerns are put together?

Robert Song: This is a really good and important question. Part of what I'm talking about, when I talk about the Baconian Project, has been talked about in environmentalist terms by many very good writers on the environment, as being about the same kind of mentality. What I've talked about as the Technology Project is exactly the project which makes the environment just the environment – it is that which 'environs', surrounds, human beings. It's a very human-centred term and for that amongst other reasons I prefer the phrase 'ecology'.

I have a PhD student who is working on the relation between bioethics and environmental ethics, and she's trying to draw in exactly the point that bioethics does not take into account environmental considerations and it could be that kind of level that you're talking about, about relations between climate change and more healthy people living in a less healthy environment. She's also doing it at the level of why we don't take into account the toxicity of environments when we're looking at different bioethical issues and so on. It is a big task. There may be think-tanks that are thinking about it, but I know of no coherent place that does it at all, which I should make clear places more responsibility on us to think, how can we change that?

Eric Pergande: Thank you for your most excellent lecture. One thing you didn't mention is the over-population of the planet. Surely this over-population, which will be added to by excellent and improved medical techniques, will make the situation even worse. Would you like to comment, please?

Robert Song: Thank you. Again, this is a very major, long-term thing, and which is very difficult to get any kind of handle on. I think the first thing to say in relation to population is that Christians do welcome children into the world, and that we are in favour of children and not against them. It does seem that the question of population is addressed by a number of factors. The biggest single statistical correlates for decreasing numbers of children are two things: how well women are educated, and how late they start having children; and of course the two are closely related. The more education a woman has, the later in life she is liable to have her first child and the later in life women have their first child, the fewer children they have. So that's one set of things: the status of women in society. The second thing which relates to population levels is overall health levels. If a woman or a couple know that children will live to a good age, that is, live past the age of one, past the age of five, they will normally start having fewer children. In other words, there are directly questions of justice and distribution related to population and justice in general relations. Population and over-population can be addressed by, I think, enlightened development policies, and it is those which show the biggest changes.

There are other correlates as well – organisation and so on. There is a deeper, underlying question: doesn't this all mean that we're going to be living for longer and consuming resources and so on? Well, that may be the case, and I think part of the modern mindset that we are unable to face up to is the fact that we're going to die, and therefore grab onto any extra days/months/years of life that we can have. It is an extra life at the cost of perhaps not knowing quite why we're living. We're having increased quantity of life but not necessarily increased quality or increased meaning of life. What modern medicine is currently giving us is extra years of poor health, and that is not such a great environment. There are some almost irreconcilable things that I think you're pointing at, and I don't think I've got any easy answers. But I don't think anyone else has either.

Wendy Boulton: This is probably a very naïve question, but how are we actually to discern which is God's image in all of this? Are we God's image? Is the cyborg of the future God's image? Which one is it? I'm confused.

Robert Song: Thank you. I do think that's the profoundest question that there is in all of this area. For Christians, ultimately God's image is in Jesus Christ. We're told in the New Testament that Jesus bears the image of the invisible God³, and therefore the true image of God is not us, nor is it a cyborg; it is Christ. It is for us to reflect that image and to live in the life that Christ gives us. Now, that's deliberately neutral about whether it's us or cyborgs or whatever. In a sense, the task is not 'what about them?' It's about us. How do we respond? And so in that sense I think we are in Christ's image and in the image of God if we are in Christ and living out that life that Christ calls us to.

Is your fear or your concern something like this: is true and essential humanity to be like we are, or is it somehow better and truer to be a cyborg, a superhuman which has got rid of all our physical failings and is much more intelligent and the rest of it? Should we be going down the cyborg route? I think that while we have the massive injustice in the world that we currently have, such a route is absolutely unacceptable. While we have such massive diversities of income and of life expectancy, health and so on, Christians must be turning to the actual people who are suffering and living and dying now, not to some supposed future. I also think, and I just raise this as a question, because I think there's no clear answer to it: I think becoming cyborgs may be a task for some other species. It's not a task for human beings. Human beings are called to be human beings and not be cyborgs. How you distinguish that, though, I think is never going to be very easy.

My current research work is precisely in the area of how do we discern between what is proper genetic therapy, the kind of things which I think we'd recognise as being good medicine, part of health and so on, and what is actually a kind of enhancement that actually is making us more than we are. There is no easy line. There may be people in this room who have heart pacemakers and in that sense those people in one minor way are already cyborgs, and yet I think we want to say that is a proper part of health and medicine. If we turned the implant into something else, which is enhancing people's capacities in a way that was superhuman or post-human, that might be something different. I think we intuitively have a distinction, and I'm currently working on how you actually make that more than just a hunch.