Boaz Goss

Full-Blooded religion is not acceptable in mainstream bioethics. This article excavates the cultural history that led to the suppression of religion in bioethics. Bioethicists typically fall into one of the following camps. 1) The irreligious, who advocate for suppressing religion, as do Timothy F. Murphy, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. This irreligious camp assumes American Fundamentalist Protestantism is the real substance of all religions. 2) Religious bioethicists, who defend religion by emphasizing its functions and diminishing its metaphysical commitments. Religious defenders empty religion of its theology to present its feel-good functions in a way that is acceptable to the irreligious. However, religion reduced to its functions dissolves into a counter-culture that may counteract materialism but lacks the power to motivate much more. This article criticizes both camps, as both presume Enlightenment myths and consequently neuter religion. Both irreligious and religious bioethicists commonly presume Enlightenment myths about secularity and religion. Secularity is presumed neutral and rational. Religion is presumed divisive and irrational. This myth provides built-in value-judgements; we have already judged secularity as good and religion as bad. Much of the debate over religion in bioethics is arguing over false stereotypes of religion. Consequently, mainstream bioethics neuters religion, while the irreligious are gifted political power to define the field.

Our goal in this paper is two-fold. First, we aim to clarify two ways in which contemporary Christian bioethicists have erred, on Engelhardt’s account, in their attempts to do bioethics within a distinctively non-Christian idiom, namely, either (1) by rejecting a principal metaethical thesis or (2) by misrepresenting a principal moral-epistemological thesis of natural-law ethics, properly construed. Second, we intend to show not only that Engelhardt can and should endorse the Christian bioethicists’ use of non-Christian moral idioms in the public square but also—perhaps to the surprise both of his critics and of his supporters—that he does, in fact, do so.

Today Christianity is maligned by secular transhumanists as the arch enemy of scientific rationality. This is a bizarre claim since Christianity provided the foundation for scientific discovery and technological progress since Antiquity. Only recently has Christianity come to be associated with irrationality, and only because a number of political and philosophical maneuvers removed Christianity from scientific and political power. Now Christianity is relegated to ethics—imagine the modern bioethicist—while science marches forward. As long as it remains on the sidelines of scientific progress, Christianity is easily silenced and villainized, and its unity with science shattered. To counter this trend, Christians need to strengthen their educational infrastructure by recovering the traditional theological vision that sees science as a vocation and technology as a channel of grace.