Re-Ordering Nature

The title of this book raises issues of both retrospect and prospect. In retrospect, it gestures to the rich background of theological scholarship about the appropriate relations between the purposes of God and the processes of nature, and the ways that nature and human nature are related to and distinguished from each other conceptually and practically. In prospect, the title gestures to the complexity of current and future conversations about deliberate human interventions into natural processes, especially in genetic applications in biotechnology. As nature itself is problematized, its status as a source of theological and moral insight grows ever less obvious, relative to its earlier interpretations in more static terms. Moreover, in light of the conceptual pluralism at work in postmodernism generally and critical studies in particular, we are ever more mindful of the ways that nature functions as a cultural construct. Recent developments in biotechnology raise especially provocative boundary or limit questions. In a general sense, biotechnology is defined as the use or alteration of materials from other living things for human benefit. In light of that definition, biotechnology might be viewed as a venerable human activity, as old as organized agriculture and animal husbandry. But the novelty of our current situation cannot be overstated. The increasing use of transgenics, where DNA is transferred across species that are quite separate in evolutionary terms, raises two broad questions: (1) what ethical constraints upon human choices are defensible in light of the physical breaching of biological boundaries once deemed impermeable? (2) Given the likelihood of an increasing pace to such boundary crossings (supportable, one assumes, by whatever warrants we identify in answering the first question), what is the “nature of human nature” itself as a reliable basis for ethical discernment and responsibility as we alter the world and ourselves (if the latter distinction can itself be clearly maintained)?

Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics