One argument surrounding the cloning issue is the thought that by cloning humans, we are playing God.

This is severely skewed. What we are in fact doing, as technology advances, is understanding the universe and manipulating it.

When the first vaccine was invented, should we have never used it, because we would have been playing God? Should we have never eradicated or even tried to stop the horrible disease smallpox? By sending humans up into space, where no organism had ever been in the entire history of life on Earth (probably), were we not playing God? No living thing was “designed” to travel into space.

I believe a kind and benevolent God, if one even exists, would want us to explore our universe and home. He/She would not want us to just sit and not think and explore — what would be the point of our creation?

How are we, in fact, creating life anyway? When a child is conceived “naturally”— is that not creating life? This is simply just another biological process, one that we discovered. One cannot assume that cloning is against the wishes of God any more than we can assume trying to understand the basic forces of nature is against the wishes of God.

Some have also claimed that a clone would have no soul. How do we know that this would be the case?

Again, this cannot be assumed. If, as many believe, every human that has ever existed has had a soul, for what reason would God not give a clone a soul? It seems rather cruel to me.

I would in closing like my fellow students to think rationally about this issue, and keep one’s mind away from the much easier knee-jerk reaction.

Jonathan Fortney

Junior

Physics