Saturday, September 11, 2010

A Disturbing Question: Will God Cooperate With Cloning?

I first asked this question years ago with the following hypothetical. I know they're getting "up there" in years, but I'll use Raquel Welch and Arnold Schwarzenegger as my "model humans."

Suppose Arnold invites Raquel to a fashionable Hollywood restaurant. Arnold pays, they get up and leave.

A waiter who had been carefully watching them runs over to their table, bags their napkins in plastic baggies, and rushes them to a cloning lab.

From the epithelial cells of each on their napkins, the lab starts cloning new Sophia and Arnold nuclei, and inserts them into ova from fertility clinics from which the original nuclei have been popped.

Presto, change-o, the lab suddenly has 6,000 Sophia's and 6,000 Arnold's, and begins to market them for $1 million, each.

Question: Will God cooperate with the scheme by giving every Arnold and Sophia clone a soul?

This is not an absurd question. I bumped-into an extremely odd case several years ago -- a New Jerseyite had a son with approximately 50 twins built into his flesh. They are all microscopic, but alive. About once a year, one of the twins starts growing, and it has to be cut-out.

Question: Do each of those twins have a soul? In other words, when the Original-Sin-tainted world went on a "cloning rampage," did God cooperate and give each of the naturally-occurring twins a soul?

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