The Roman Catholic Church and embryonic stem cells

embryonic stem cells Skene and Parker raise a number of concerns about religious doctrine unduly influencing law and public policy through amicus curiae contributions to civil litigations or direct lobbying of politicians. Oakley picks this up in the same issue with an emphasis on the Roman Catholic Church’s interest in preventing the destruction of embryos for embryonic stem cell research. Skene, Parker, and Oakley seem to be concerned mostly with religious views having undue influence on public policy. My concern is the negative effect that such Church influenced public policy may have on the progress of the biomedical research that is itself foundational to the debate. Oakley seems to be particularly incensed that, as he puts it: ‘‘Those who support a total ban on embryonic stem cell research sometimes talk as if theirs are the only views based on moral principle’’. What seems to be at issue here though are not the moral principles of the sanctity and dignity of human life, but the application of those moral principles to biomedical research. The Roman Catholic Church has historically defended the sanctity and dignity of human life to varying degrees at different times. Human life for much of the past 2000 years was defined by the Church as the presence of the soul, which was thought at different times to appear at various different stages during development. Only recently, with the advent of modern biology, has the Roman Catholic Church shifted its position to claim that the fertilised egg also qualifies as the right sort of human life. It should be noted that this doctrinal change was fundamentally driven by developments in our understanding of embryology and not the process of ensoulment. The Church’s current position on the embryo is thus based not solely on Church doctrine but also on a specific interpretation of our empirical observations of human development. It is the Church’s interpretation of the biology of early human development that is foundational to their current stand against experimentation on early embryos. However one of the reasons we may wish to experiment on early embryos is that we know surprisingly little about them. In fact any position that claims to be based on a solid, empirical understanding of the embryo is essentially misleading, as we simply do not have the data available. The reply to this will inevitably be that we know enough about embryos to make certain claims. For example the Roman Catholic Church likes to point out that the early embryo is obviously the earliest stage of a human life, and thus attributes to it many of the rights associated with actual people. Many would disagree with this on the grounds that the Church has confused being merely human with being a person. I am concerned by the claim that the early embryo is obviously the early stages of a human life. My concern is not that the claim isn’t obvious to some people but that obviousness is a dangerous thing when it comes to science. It is, for example, quite obvious to me that I am currently sitting at my desk. Empirically my senses seem to confirm that I am more or less stationary. I may well believe that I am stationary. For much of human history we believed the earth to be stationary at the centre of the universe. This assumption was confirmed in the Western world by the Church itself. Church doctrine confirmed that the earth was the stationary centre of the universe with the heavens above and hell below. When Galileo challenged this view by promoting the sun centred Copernican system of cosmology the Roman Catholic Church attempted to silence him. The Church’s attack on Galileo and Copernicanism was tripartite. Firstly, the Copernican system appeared to contradict some scriptures. Secondly, the Copernican system contradicted the church sanctioned science of the day represented by Aristotelian physics. Thirdly, was the appeal to obviousness or the immediate evidence of the senses. Of the three, only the scriptural objections were fundamentally doctrinal in nature. The appeals to science and obviousness were able to be settled by empirical evidence. We now know that we are not stationary at the centre of the universe although this is still far from obvious to many people.