Playing God, Frankenstein, Human Cloning, and the Imitation of God

66 Pages·2005·0.3 MB·English

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Playing God, Frankenstein, Human Cloning,
and the Imitation of God
For COV&R 2005,
Koblenz, Germany
Andrew Bartlett
Kwantlen University College,
Surrey, BC, Canada V3W 2M8
[email protected]

[Note to readers: please know this project is incomplete: sections IX and X are yet to be
composed: my apologies. But if the topic interests you, there is more than enough here to
convey the direction of the study. + AHB.]

I. Playing God-as-Creator and the Punctual Scenicity of Human Origin
“Playing God” is not “the imitation of God”; the imitation of God is not playing God.
This truth is revealed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) and in
the “Frankenstein Story” (to be delineated below) which Shelley bequeathed to modern culture.
The religious believer might feel the dangerousness of “playing God” requires no demonstration,
the nonbeliever that the notion of “the imitation of God” possesses only antique value, and so we
are wasting our time. But it is the argument of this study that the piety, or the faith, implicit in
the prohibition against “playing God” provides an ethical touchstone for believers and
nonbelievers alike. Everybody has the knowledge that God has sometimes been thought to act
as a destroyer. But a prohibition against playing God the destroyer is widely shared in the
postmodern era inaugurated by Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Believers and nonbelievers, we
would not say a deluded megalomaniac who wants to bring about nuclear holocaust and
singlehandedly annihilate our species exemplifies “the imitation of God,” but we would certainly
accuse him of “playing God.” This consensus separating our idea of the imitation of God from
that of playing God is a good sign. The consensus becomes more significant in the context of the
eminently shareable quality of generative anthropology’s idea of God: the idea of God is that of
a minimal being who sustains the possibility of the human from the beginning of history; to
imitate God would be to continue to make the human possible; the idea of God may be active in
the opening creation of the human community but has no part in its destruction.1 Generative
anthropology is here in total agreement with Rene Girard’s idea of apocalypse: the destructive

1 Eric Gans’ development of generative anthropology’s idea of God may be found in “Jewish Culture:
Narrative Monotheism,” chapter 9 of The End of Culture (1985); Science and Faith: the Anthropology of Revelation
(1990); “The Anthropological Idea of God”, chapter 2 of Originary Thinking (1993); “The Unique Source of
Religion and Morality” (1996) in Contagion; “The Two Varieties of Truth” chapter 4 of Signs of Paradox (1997).
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violence of the end times comes not from God but from humanity.2

The prohibition against playing God the creator is, alas, not so universally shared as that
against playing God the destroyer. The connotations of “creating” itself seem all positive:
creation, creator, creativity, recreation, procreation. (That “creature” is the only dubious cognate
is significant: the creature/creator duality recalls the originary resentment of the creatures on the
periphery against the creator- center at the emission of the first human sign.) Different to our
shared sense that “the imitation of God” does not include playing God the destroyer, we would
probably resent any total prohibition against the imitation of God-as-creator as the smothering of
human freedom. When we think of God, we think of human freedom, even if only + minimally
+ the creative freedom not to think of God, to assert our human difference from his un-believable
divinity. Eric Gans formulates this irony thus: “Even if someday not one believer remains, the
atheist will remain someone who rejects belief in God, not someone for whom the concept is
empty” (Originary Thinking 42+43). More expansively, adding to that minimal negative
freedom, the thought of God may suggest divine love and care, mercy and goodness. If the
imitation of God as creator is the imitation of “love,” then few people object to it: witness the
widespread affection for Paul’s discourse of charity in First Corinthians.3 Only the most
resentful atheist is scandalized by the fact that the historical antecedents of what secular thought
now interprets as forms of purely human creativity were once interpreted as forms imitating the
creative work of God. But even so, the imitation of God-as- creator must be bounded. God
created the universe; but only delusional people believe want to create the universe, or believe
they have created it already. Our capacity for the imitation of God’s creative activity must
admit exceptions. Scandal appears when humans try to imitate the inimitable creative acts of
God.

2
See Girard, “Science and Apocalypse,” Things Hidden (1987), 253+62.
3 The popular text reads in part: “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous and boastful; it is not
arrogant or rude. Love does not insists on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong,
but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never
ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass
away.” (I Corinthians 13: 4+10.)
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The accusatory implications of the phrase “playing God” convey that sense of scandal.4
“Playing God” as a metaphor implies, among other things (childishness, frivolity, sport) that
playing God is a self-destructive exercise determined to fail because it means taking up only a
role labelled “God,” as if God were only a character, a script-part, and not God. God is a Being
or a person; but a character is always already only an imitation of a person, or a person already
reduced to a measurable textual finiteness. God is not merely a representation; God is the central
(virtual) force that sustains the communal ground of representation. A human being of even the
most minimal religious or political piety is one who understands that “God” means a being who
is in some creative aspects impossible-to-be-imitated and thus not-to-be-imitated, because some
acts of God must be in-imitable, which is a way of confessing the reality of God’s otherness.
“Imitation” includes the necessity of the difference between imitator and model in this case: the
madness implicit in “playing God” is the madness of erasing that minimal difference which
grounds human community (the difference between center and periphery on the scene of
representation), the minimal “external mediation” of mimetic theory. The “player” believes he
can do things only God should do since for him, God is fiction (God never takes the ostensive
form), a piece on a board game, a token without referent. “Playing God” means mimicry, a
stepping onto a vacant stage where power is there for the taking and one person’s go is as good
as another’s, where the absent mimicked person may be mocked without fear of reprisal.

The imitation of God implies (on the contrary) a spirit of humility, a meditation on God
as an Other to whom one submits willingly, a disciplined following of a divine model whose
performance of beautiful goodness it is impossible -- one must understand from the outset --
impossible in some aspects to surpass or outdo. The imitation of God- as-creator must respect at
least the requirement of a minimal inimitability of God. He who plays God paradoxically
believes he can be God, since in carrying on as if “God” is only a role, no real model exists, so
he can be, well, just himself-as-human-God. But he who imitates God believes he can never be
God because he believes God has at least one aspect of real in-imitability.

If the imitation of God remains a beautiful ideal, the question then becomes, which of the
creative acts of God are not-to-be-imitated, other than (of course) the creation of the universe?
As the cultural beneficiaries of the Frankenstein legacy, we know one answer already: human
beings ought not to imitate God’s act of the originary creation of human beings. Why not?
Because the human can be created only once, in an event which has always already taken place,

4
For discussions of the semantics of the phrase “playing God”itself, see Graham 145+46; Harris 26; Peters
10+14; Lewontin 156+57; Verhey. It must be said that this study assumes the phrase has more cultural and
anthropological significance than most of these voices suggest. The “scientific” attitude and the scalpel of the
analytic philosopher seem to wish to reduce its meaning to propositional content, which, we would agree, yields
little in the way of illuminating results. But declarative truth is not the only form of truth. Situated in the context of
generative anthropology and related to the originary hypothesis, “playing God” takes on much significance.
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the very event of God’s creation of the human. All stories of humans “creating” humans
(creating, not procreating or making babies) are stories, therefore, of the creation of artificial
humans. Humans can “create” only artificial humans.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus contains the original model for
all later imaginings of the modern scientific usurper who tries in vain to take God’s place and
make the human anew. That any imitation of the divine such as Frankenstein’s can produce only
an artificial human reminds us that the real thing, the real human, originated previously, on a
scene other than the one over which the all-too-human Victor Frankenstein presides. Denial of
the reality of that originary scene is the denial of the inimitability of God’s unique creation of the
human. It is madness, it is bad science, to sidestep the necessity of formulating and respecting
an hypothesis about the way that the human originated once and for all, in a non-repeatable
event, a moment to be re-membered in a spirit of religious humility in an attempt to preserve the
unity of the human community. Religion has always calmly grasped this truth, even if science --
“natural philosophy”-- has dreamed at times of proving its purported necessity a dispensable
illusion.5

In the vocabulary of generative anthropology, if science rejects the hypothesis of the
necessary punctuality and scenicity of the event of human origin, science denies the uniqueness
of the human. The resistance of science to “religion” even in this minimal sense of an
anthropological hypothesis about the real origin of the human explains why Shelley’s Victor
Frankenstein, H.G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and Karel Capek’s
Old Rossum of R.U.R. [Rossum’s Universal Robots] (1923) submit quite willingly to the idea of
the unpunctuated linearity of gradualist evolution, in which the “animal” merges imperceptibly
into the human, and a coherent story (or hypothesis) about the origin of culture is a secondary
concern. Evolutionary gradualism absolves them of the responsibility to grasp that inimitable
uniqueness of the event of human origin, and the uniqueness of all that which followed from it
which makes the human: human language, resentment, religion, culture, desire, art, ritual, moral
intuition. (Likewise for the deist, God shows up at the origin of the physico-material world, but

5 I am deliberately echoing Gans: “There would be no declarative truth without ostensive truth; no truth of
reason without the truth of faith. This has always been known by religion, but not in a way that has permitted it to
be understood by philosophy. Originary thinking explores the locus common to the cognitive operations of these
two domains” (Signs of Paradox 51+52).
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God is too indifferent to make any special appearance at the origin of humanity: the emergence
of the uniquely human is, for the deist Creator, no more or less essential than any other lockstep
in the march of the predetermined or the a-cultural evolutionary.)

Thus absolved of the responsibility to respect the originating activity of God,
Frankenstein and Moreau and Rossum are free to enjoy the irresponsibility that permits their
attempts to create the human all over again: they forget the unique can be created only once.
This study will argue that the“responsibility” which so vanishes is indistinguishably intellectual
and moral: an aspiration to “the imitation of God” invites us to recall the responsibility, but the
attitude unafraid of “playing God” signals our already having forgotten it. Frankenstein and
heirs never succeed in creating the human: instead, they create only create pale imitations,
androids, humanoids, deformations, mutants, robots, automatons, cyborgs, machines, doubles of
the human, monsters, scapegoats -- artificial humans. That uniquely creative presence at the
origin of the human which is given the name “God” can not find its substitute in the mere
presence of one bold human being and the science he brandishes; that is the truth, at once
religious and secular, that mimetic theory illuminates as the anthropological wisdom of the
Frankenstein story.

Human cloning stands as the figure of what seems to be the contemporary real-world
incarnation of Frankenstein’s project: the creation of the first human clone at first glance feels
only like sacrilege (playing God). But even though it is certainly “playing God” to forget the
unrepeatable uniqueness of human origin and so go ahead and create artificial humans, it may
not so certainly follow that human cloning must be prohibited. New scientific truth frequently
upsets cultural order. It is playing God to say humanity must know everything that remains to be
known; it is also playing God to say we know already everything there is to know. The religious
believer suspicious of the tendencies of scientific hubris will probably be scandalized even by
the opening of the possibility that “the imitation of God” might include bringing into the world
the first human clone.6 But the possibility may be opened in acknowledgment of the freedom
that God made possible at the origin, the space given to humanity in which it became possible to
imitate the divine. The scientific skeptic opposed to religious hubris (think Galileo, Darwin)
would point out that the uniqueness of the human includes not only the punctuality of its origin,
but also the ethical and scientific progress made since: all that has been made possible by the gift
of the sign -- religion, culture, art, ritual, agriculture, architecture, medicine, writing, printing,
flying aeroplanes, electronically communicating. We do an infinite number of things that no

6
The “probably” in the sentence is not intended to pre-judge all “religious believers,” but to concur with
the drift of Ronald Green’s remarks: “Because religions’ ethical teachings on sexual ethics evolved over centuries
within traditional cultural contexts, these traditions are often unable to respond rapidly to new possibilities made
possible by technological change. Witness how long it has taken most religious communities to respond to the
revolution represented by the advent of birth control and rapid population growth in our century (some have still not
done so). The slow response to emergent biological understandings of homosexuality is another example” (129).
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other species on earth does: to underplay that fact is false humility. God acts in history;
otherwise, God is not God.7 God acts for us by showing us new ways to move, new things to
make, new beauties to enjoy.

The history of technique is not just a history of terrorism; the process of the
desacralization of “nature” is not just a series of tales of sacrilege. The dreaded disappearance of
God may paradoxically be celebrated as the slow historical appearing of God’s goodness in
permitting, giving places to and centers for the expression of, human freedom. Even our fear of
this freedom might usefully be likened to the fear of God. If thoughts of human cloning induce
panic attacks of “futurism,” the belief that “technology can impose ethical imperatives on people
not yet ready for them” in the manner of an “ethical shock” which thrusts us helplessly into a
nightmare brave new world (Gans 1997: “Futurism and Sexuality”), it restores some calm to
recall that in modern society there is more freedom than ever to refuse.

Our opening of the possibility that a human clone might be something not to be
denounced outright is made also in the spirit of originary thinking. Our goal is not to “come
down on one side or another” of the human cloning debate, but to “clarify the positions of both
sides, revealing them to be anthropological hypotheses rather than conflicting affirmations of
moral absolutes” (Gans 2002: “Originary and Provisional Morality”). The possibility of human
cloning is a scandal, but nothing is gained by demonizing those in favour of it as Frankensteins,
demonizing those opposed as anti-scientific cowards, or (most oddly) demonizing the clone that
has not yet even been created. The not-yet-created, like the not-yet-born or the not-yet-revealed,
falls under the protection of God in that it too must be an object of moral concern. One lesson of
Frankenstein are the disastrous consequences of the failure of the human anticipatory
imagination. If one wishes not to play God, then one must imagine in advance the possible

7
I have in mind here Raymund Schwager’s remarks on “the belief [of Jesus] that history is essentially
determined by the actions of God and the nearness of his kingdom” as that belief impinges on the imperialistic
designs of the “contemporary critical methodology” (30) which would consider the action of God extraneous to the
understanding of the reality of the historical past.
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consequences of one’s scientific work, especially when such work threatens to disfigure the
human or the boundary between the divine and the human. Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein fails
miserably to anticipate the suffering he causes his monster, indeed, the suffering that makes his
monster a monster.

II The Imitation of God and the Problem of Models for Moral Action

What is the imitation of God in itself, setting aside its differences from the delinquent
mockery of “playing God”? The idea of the imitation of God has, it must be said, a deep and
dignified history centuries longer than that of the recently coined and circulated post-modern
expression “playing God.”8 We might begin to seek an independent definition with help from
Martin Buber, who in his beautiful essay “Imitatio Dei,” declares that the idea of the imitation of
God points toward the “central paradox of Judaism” (37). He elaborates as follows.

A paradox, for how should man be able to imitate God, the
invisible, incomprehensible, unformed, not to be formed? One can
only imitate that of which one has an idea + no matter whether it
be an idea springing from imagination or from memory; but as
soon as one forms an idea of God for oneself, it is no longer he
whom one contemplates, and an imitation founded on this idea
would be no imitation of him. (38)

The imitation of God remains impossible as long as we are contemplating the absolute otherness
of God, the sacred difference of God from the human community (in the language of generative
anthropology, the absolute otherness of the central source of originary resentment). After more
searching, Martin Buber proposes that the descriptive statement “We perfect our souls to God”
(39) is a respectful formulation of the idea: “the perfection of a soul is called its being like God,
which yet does not mean any equality, but means that this soul has made actual that image which
was granted it” (39). The desire of human beings “to reach the likeness intended for them in
their creation by other means than by perfecting ‘the image’” (40; emphasis added) caused the
Fall of the first human beings. God is at the origin: we must perfect the image he gives us, not

8
I have been unable to locate the “first use” of this expression. The impression I have gathered, as yet
unverifiable, is that it entered public discourse after world War II, in response to technologies of the bomb, and was
appropriated in the 1970s by opponents of genetic engineering such as Jeremy Rifkin, and launched by them into the
common public imagination.
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another image (that way lies idolatry). Perfecting an image, however, would seem rather too
abstract to convey ethical content in that “image” is not yet “imitation”: there is no model for
action.

Toward the end of the essay, Buber comes to provide figures for the imitatio dei. To
imitate God is to walk in the ways of God; some of those ways can be described. God appears as
an actor in human history. To the absolute otherness of God, these anthropomorphisms may be a
scandal; but to the human aspiration to imitate God, they are a necessity.

As he clothed the nakedness of the first human beings, as he
visited the sick... as he comforted Isaac with his blessing after
Abraham’s death... As he himself buried Moses + all these are...
visible patterns for man... “My handicraft,” as the Midrash lets
God say to Abraham, “is to do good + you have taken up my
handicraft.” (42+43)

The Christian may hear in this passage musical correspondences with Jesus’ parable of the
sheep and the goats (Matthew 25: 31+46). The imitatio Christi, as one would hope and expect,
harmonizes at least this much with the imitatio Dei. At this point, we can draw connections
between Martin Buber’s theological reflections on the imitation of God and Eric Gans’ analysis
of the same problem set in an anthropological context.

Describing God’s historical action at the beginning of Jewish narrative monotheism,
Gans writes: “God’s motivations as imagined by man can only be those a man would have in
[God’s] place; but to imagine oneself in God’s place, to imagine ‘what God would do’ in such
and such a situation, is already to understand, albeit only implicitly, the secondariness of sacred
difference with respect to the needs of humanity” (End of Culture 201). Generative
anthropology invites us to understand God as one who in his actions paradoxically leaves
humans free to put the “needs of humanity” before “sacred difference.” It is humans who need
the one God named by the sign in order to become humans; the one God named by the sign must
have humans in order to be named. God is famously “jealous” not out of petty self-admiration,
but out of concern that the community remain faithful to the unique equalizing difference that its
respect for the one sacred center makes. The questionable ethics of the tribal God of Genesis
and Exodus becomes the world-historical revelation of moral reciprocity only under the sign of
God’s absolute self-giving on the cross. God reveals the scandalous openness of history to
human freedom when he lets us persecute and crucify his only Son: there, surrounding the cross,
we become in our complete freedom responsible for all human good and evil, creation and
destruction.

Another way of getting at the anthropology implicit in the idea of the imitation of God is
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to follow Gans’ description of God’s interventions on behalf of his chosen Hebrew people: “God
himself is above ethical law because he incarnates the principle of morality, not [morality] as
abstract reciprocity [but] morality as action for the benefit of the community” (End of Culture
205). It is impossible to imitate that God named by the very first sign merely as the one-named
(“abstract reciprocity”), it is impossible to be ourselves above ethical law. But it is not
impossible to imitate the God who acts in history: “action for the benefit of the community”
(205). The unrepeatable firstness of God’s creation of humanity gives way in the Biblical
narrative to a certain anthropomorphizing (perhaps anthropologizing) of God, in the sequences
of history.

The establishment of an absolute sacred difference is only the
point of departure for a narrative in which God, at every stage,
incarnates the moral force that converts human resentment into
ethical order. As this moral force is personalized, it cannot be
conceptually understood but can be recognized only in specific
acts of God’s will. (End of Culture 209).

It is in such a narrative of action that the human imitation of God as creative agent may be
carried out. The morality of such a carrying-out requires a spirit of humility before the other,
whether the divine or the human other. If we are to be humble before God, again, we can not
presume to know all of his “ways.” If we are humble before the cross, we come to grasp that the
absolute uniqueness of Jesus’ victimary status can never be repeated any more than can the
uniqueness of God in the creation of the unredeemed human community can be repeated.9 And
in the post-modern era, in which “global community” is not an empty phrase and any world war
must be a civil war, if we are not to be playing God we need ways to think of “the community”
that such actions might benefit as the human community.

9
On generative anthropology’s formulation of that uniqueness, see Gans, “The Christian Revelation,”
chapter 4 of Science and Faith (1990).
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The moral crisis we sense when contemplating human genetic engineering in general +
not just cloning + derives partly from the fact that values such as “human community” and
“human needs” are, unhappily, concepts which seem to resolve very little.10 Could the creation
of a clone help to preserve or benefit the human community or respond to the needs of
humanity? Would the clone even be “human” or is “human clone” already oxymoronic, a
disfiguration of the uniquely human? Under threat of human genetic engineering, both sides in
the human cloning debate can claim to serve essential needs and to represent the truly human
community. We do not exaggerate to say that some of the most fundamental categories of
human thought seem to be cancelled with the violence of a certain indifference by the powers
that human genetic engineering -- HGE + places within our reach. Ronald Dworkin correctly
insists that HGE unsettles the “overall structure of our moral and ethical experience” (444) by
dissolving the originary distinctions between nature and culture, God and human, the determined
and the free, “between who and what we are, for which either a divine will or no one but a blind
process is responsible, and what we do with that inheritance, for which we are indeed, separately
or together, responsible” (444; emphasis added). It may also be true that people deeply worried
by the powers of HGE, as Dworkin describes them, “think that the very essence of the
distinction between what God or nature provide, and what they are responsible for making of or
with that provision, is to be defined physically, in terms of what is in ‘the genes’ or... the
‘blood’” (445). This belief in genetic determinism, what R.C. Lewontin calls the “fetishism of
‘blood’” (161), may be mistaken to some degree: “were it not for the belief in blood as essence,

10 These reflections of Gans are in the background here: “The arguments adduced on both sides of these
questions invoke ad hoc principles such as ‘the sanctity of human life’ or ‘a woman’s right to control her body,’ that
cannot be assimilated to Kantian maxims of morality. As is often noted sarcastically + by both sides + ‘the sanctity
of human life’ tends to be interpreted in opposite ways in the two controversies; those who oppose abortion tend to
support the death penalty and vice versa. This suggests, not that general moral principles are self-contradictory, but
that [they ] are useless in real world-cases; principles that are truly universal are by definition agreed upon by all
and consequently compatible with both sides” (Gans 2002: “Originary and Provisional Morality”).