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bringing honor to and knowing God. Human beings have genuine lib-
ertarian freedom that undergirds the notion of moral responsibility and
criminal justice. Morality comes ultimately from the character of a tran-
scendent God, who issues commands consistent with His character.
Right and wrong are not fundamentally human creations and are not
fluid and changing with changing times and cultures. Finally, history
has a definite direction because God will bring history to its culmination
with the return of Christ.
Of course, arguing that naturalism is inconsistent with Christian the-
ism is unlikely to carry much weight with the naturalist. But there are
Biotechnology and Competing Worldviews 45
other aspects of the naturalist view of the world that deserve comment.
Our observations are consistent with Christian theism but not depen-
dent on it. In other words, one does not have to accept Christian the-
ism as a worldview to have philosophical reservations about naturalism.
A first observation is that the naturalist s fundamental thesis cannot
meet the test of its own criteria. The statements All reality is material
and All knowledge is that which is empirically verifiable are them-
selves not empirically verifiable. Thus, these statements are self-
refuting. They are not scientific statements but rather philosophical
statements about science. Yet they are treated as unassailable facts in-
stead of the philosophical commitments that they are. For the material-
ist to discount the theist s worldview because it is a faith commitment
is disingenuous at best and hypocritical at worst.
One can see evidence of this flaw in scientific reasoning in the discus-
sion in genetics. The scientists who are reducing the notion of person-
hood to one s genetics are making a fundamental methodological error
in expecting biological data to provide the foundations for metaphysical
questions. Biology and biochemistry provide the raw material for bio-
logical and biochemical questions. They cannot decisively answer what
are ultimately metaphysical questions. When molecular biologists make
such metaphysical claims about the nature of personhood, they are no
longer practicing molecular biology. They have become metaphysicians
and are inappropriately extending their expertise from biology to meta-
physics. One simply cannot extrapolate metaphysical conclusions from
biological and biochemical data without leaving one s scientific field.
The scientists who are arguing for some sort of genetic reductionism
are imposing their view of the world on their work and drawing meta-
physical conclusions that simply cannot be drawn from their field of
expertise.
A second concern about naturalism arises in the moral and social
implications of such a worldview. The way in which people are held
morally and criminally responsible for their actions strongly suggests
that they possess free will. This is a necessary presupposition for any
concept of moral responsibility to have meaning. That is, people make
genuinely free choices, for which they deserve praise or blame. Society s
notion of criminal justice is premised on such a view of a human person.
46 CHAPTER THREE
Naturalism implies determinism, and such a view undermines impor-
tant notions of free will and attendant moral responsibility. If all events
are caused by prior events (known as event causation), then there is no
room in the system for free agency in which a person is a first or un-
moved mover acting freely. Of course, one may be influenced by de-
sires, past events, and so forth, but that is very different from insisting
that one s actions were caused by those things. The concept of charac-
ter is premised on freedom to make one s choices, which thereby con-
tribute to shaping identity. To take determinism seriously, as would
seem to be implied by a naturalist view of a human person, would un-
dermine critical moral and legal notions of personal and criminal re-
sponsibility. Some have tried to argue that genuine freedom can emerge
in a strictly physical universe, but these claims are unpersuasive.38 The
only notion of freedom existing for the naturalist is unpredictability at
the quantum level, but that at best is an unpredictable determination.
A further difficulty for the naturalist in the area of moral responsibil-
ity comes from the failure of physicalism to account for personal iden-
tity. If a human being is nothing more than the collection of physical
parts and properties, then nothing like the soul exists, and no notions
of this concept make any sense given a physicalist view of a human
being. More important, for the physicalist there is nothing to ground
personal identity through time and change. Some physicalists try to
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