[Professor S]

Originally Posted by GiMpY-wAnNaBe

I mean what I said, in the sense that humanity is something that all humans need to live. Putting importance on some obscure indefinate object like humanity doesn't coincide with the way that i view our race as a whole. The human mind is a complex computer that inputs data and outputs our actions, these actions are varied based on what the input is, not on what "humanity" is in us that has existed since created by either an omniscient being or otherwise. bothering to try and understand what i say often works better then outright dismissing it.

I dismissed it because at first glance your original post was dismissive itself. Now that you actually explained your opinion instead of merely stating something as obtuse as "never existed in the first place", we actually have an idea of what yoiur opinion is, instead of your little nonsensical quip.

And I disaggree with you whole-heartedly and believe the cynical existentialism that your opinion reflects causes more problems with our global society than it does in shedding light on it.

Brains are NOT a computer. Brains are far more complex than that. They are an organic organ that CREATED computers and are capable of far more than any computer is. Brains are capable of love, hate, jealousy, sympathy, empathy, etc. These are the functions of the brain that made man the dominant species on the planet. It was our ability to care for one another that lead to such advances as fire, agriculture and other things that we take for granted.

I actually had a professor who once stated that agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to the world. His argument was that once we began to alter the environment to suit our needs we began a downward spiral that we continue on today. He believed that we would be better off staying a species that survived on hunting and gathering. It would keep our population stable and and preserve the world for indefinite generations to come. Plus without agriculture there would be no sense of ownership and much of the world's violence would never take place, and that agriculture stemmed from an innate need for humans to gain power and lord it over others.

To my shock the majority of my classmates were nodding their heads in agreement. This comment that he seemed to throw out as common knowledge and fact, a comment that I immediately recognized as absolute balderdash, was being eaten up. I raised my hand and responded as such (this is not a direct quote, but its something along these lines):

"Are you ****ing kidding me? Agriculture came from man's need for power? Did you even think about this before you said it? Hunting and gathering cultures are reliant on the environment like any other animals. If there are a few good winters, which leads to abundance and therefore a spike in reproduction, followed by a bad winter you suddenly have too many people and far too little food. So people start DYING. Mothers watch their children starve and be eaten by disease. Sons watch their elderly fathers lose strength and whither. THIS is what made agriculture a necessity, not some sort of self-hating imaginary power-lust that is inherent in all of mankind. Its very easy to call agriculture a demon to mankind when we take our and our childrens health for granted and remove ourselves from the situation completely. As for agriculture being the cause of violence, Native American cultures were in essence hunters and gatherers and they constantly fought and were very warlike before modern agriculture ever arrived in America." He then stuttered something and told me I was disrupting his class. Dolt.

Agriculture stems from our HUMANITY. Our empathy towards people we don't know stems from our HUMANITY. Our need to see injustices righted and those that prey on the weak punished stems from our HUMANITY. Humanity is a very real and tactual aspect of our species, and I'm sad you can't see it.

We would still be humans. Just humans with really cool technology.

Would we know what to do with this technology or have a clue how to use it responsibly? The power to create life is one that creates ethical and human rights issues that I do not want to see us ever deal with.

God is constantly used to explain mystery. God used to be used to explain common happenings in nature and science, but as our knowledge of the world grew we learned exactly why certain things happened. We know why objects don't fall off the face of the earth, we know why hurricanes form and why it rains, we know what causes earth quakes and electric storms. Through the centuries God has been used to explain less and less things.

If we figure out how to create life, and then figure out how life was created, God won't be needed to explain that anymore.

If you really believe that then you are kidding yourself. Religion has always refuted science in simply that faith does not require empirical research or facts. Hence it is faith. If you said "See? We created life so that proves God doesn't exist", a mildly faithful person would immediately dismiss you by saying "God gave us the ability to create life, as He made us in his own image." Simple as that.

It's just how it is. Creating life will not make us Gods. It will just further our understanding of the world around us.

Saying that "when man creates life man becomes God" is a bit of an overstatement. A huge one, in fact. I don't believe in God, but I do understand that there is more to him/her than making life.

I worded the question in more of a philosophical sense that a religious one. God was my metaphor for the humility and wonder with which we examine our own existence. If we can create life, which to many is the last great question in the universe as well as state of being, what will that leave us? What will it benefit us in the long run? What dangers does it pose? My worry is not is simply having the knowledge of how life was created, but what we WILL DO with that knowledge.

More specifically my question relates to this scenario:

Man creates human life from scratch and therefore becomes the metaphorical God. What value does this life form have? It is human... but a human that was created by man. Does this lessen the value of that man? Is he even considered a man, or a biological android and we can tweak and alter before birth to serve needs? Could he simply be available to harvest for organs? We already do that with stem cells by creating life for the sole reason to destroy it for the good of those that are already walking so its not that far fetched. If we tweak him enough to look dissimilar in almost everyway, can we convince ourselves that he is not a man and therefore will have the right to choosing his own fate denied from him? Even if there is no God, can we become Him through this knowledge and what could be the ramifications of that?

These questions I'm posing aren't new by any means. They've already been posed by such people as Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, Ridley Scott, etc. True, they are all science fiction artists, but their science fiction is on the cusp of being science fact if we choose to stumble forward with advances we have not taken the time to fully consider.

Just because you CAN do something, that doesn't mean you SHOULD do it. And until we do take the time to examine these advances scientifically, philosophically and yes, theologically, I don't think we should just blindly trust those whose research could do no less that change the world as we know it.