PART ONE: The Brave New World
In 1932, English writer Aldous Huxley wrote one of the most famous books of all time, with the strange title Brave New World. The title is a quote from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and suggests both the boldness and the folly of something that looks like a utopia (paradise) even though it much more closely approaches the opposite.
Eleven years later, C. S. Lewis wrote a short essay that some people consider the most important thing he ever did. With incredible insight, his work The Abolition of Man looked ahead to the technologies of the twenty-first century and warned that a world that uncritically accepts the wonders of biotech will eventually devastate human dignity.
Thus the secular Huxley and the Christian Lewis set the stage for the challenges of the twenty-first century. Some of these challenges still await us; many already are with us. Christians need to be prepared so they can be “salt and light” in the time and place where God has placed them.
Human beings are unique because God made us “in his image,” as the Bible makes so clear in Genesis 1 and Psalm 8. Reminding ourselves of what it means to be made in God’s image is the starting point for understanding what medicine, science, and technology should be used for — and what they should not.
In the last chapter of this section, we need to hear the long-forgotten story of what happened a hundred years ago, when Americans discovered “eugenics” — the desire for “good genes” at all costs — before the Nazis ever came to power in Germany and took those same ideas to their logical conclusion. We need to remember, because eugenics is making a comeback.