If you are a Christian, you believe the ethics and morality of your faith are transcendent. Muslims believe that the gobbledygook in their holy book is revealed truth and applicable at all times and all places. The Spartans believed the gods Ares and Apollo favored the Spartans and their ethics. Being a strong warrior was the ultimate good so leaving defective infants in the woods or tossing them off a cliff was considered perfectly logical and ethical.

Even murder has been, to some degree, within the bounds of acceptable in Western society. The weregeld in the Salic Code was literally the price of a man. Kill a man and you paid his family or clan a fee. There was no distinction between murder and manslaughter so it did not matter if you accidentally killed the man or hunted him down, the fee was the same.

The point here is that ethics and morality are not universal in humankind. There are common threads, but the prevailing religion of the society codifies the attitudes of the people. If the people’s culture permits sex with children then sex with children will be ethical according to their religion. If the culture of the people prohibits adultery, then you get a all sorts of religious and ethical prohibitions against adultery like forcing women to wear blankets over their heads in public.

In modern America, it is more difficult to stake out the ethical turf because our religion is invisible to us. The people in charge are all adherents to Cultural Marxism, but they not only deny it, they don’t think of it as a religion. Instead, they think “science” and “maths” lead them to their ethics. The results are these weird debates like the one over gene editing.

A bioethical firestorm erupted last week when Chinese researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University published research in the journal Protein & Cell detailing how they had tried to use the CRISPR gene-editing tool to change the genomes of 86 human embryos. The team, led by the gene-function researcher Junjiu Huang, used embryos from IVF clinics that had been double-fertilized, giving them three sets of genes instead of the usual two. Such triploid embryos cannot grow into babies.

The researchers sought to make changes in a gene that causes the sometimes fatal blood disorder beta-thalassemia. The aim is to find out just how effectively and efficiently CRISPR can make changes to genes in human embryos, with the ultimate goal of altering embryos such that any subsequently born babies will be disease-free. This is known as germ-line modification, since the corrected gene will be passed down to subsequent progeny.

The Chinese scientists essentially ignored recent calls for a moratorium on editing human reproductive cells and embryos. The month before their paper appeared, Sciencerecommended that such research be “strongly discourage[d]” while the “societal, environmental, and ethical implications of such activity are discussed among scientific and governmental organizations.” Meanwhile, Nature had editorialized that “genome editing in human embryos using current technologies could have unpredictable effects on future generations. This makes it dangerous and ethically unacceptable….At this early stage, scientists should agree not to modify the DNA of human reproductive cells.” Some 40 countries have preemptively banned germline genetic engineering. (The United States is not among them.)

Not too surprisingly, both Science and Nature reportedly declined to publish Junjiu Huang’s study on “ethical” grounds.

The research naturally provoked some bioethical handwringing. “No researcher has the moral warrant to flout the globally widespread policy agreement against altering the human germline,” declared Marcy Darnovsky, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “The medical risks and social dangers of human germline modification cannot be overstated.” She further urged, “We need to act immediately to strengthen the global policy agreements that put human germline modification off limits.” In The Christian Science Monitor, University of Wisconsin at Madison bioethicist Alta Charo asked, “Do we really want to have the power not just to select among the choices given to us by nature, but to create entirely new choices of our own specification?”

Catholics have little problem with these problems, having had 2,000 years to work out the details of the nature of man. Most Christians, getting their ethics from the Catholics, have an easy answer, too. Having a supernatural source for your ethics naturally makes these things easier to sort. You look in the holy book or ask the holy man and you have your answer.

In the materialist world of today, the utopians always fall on the side of trying to perfect life on earth. That means anything that can be done should be done. Eugenics, after all, was about “fixing” the mistakes of nature by eliminating from the breeding stock those people deemed unfit. This lack of a limiting principle means anything goes. The only check is the long hangover from the Christian era.

That’s what makes the very idea of bioethics laughable to me. From what authority do these people derive their authority? They can’t point to science as their authority for obvious reasons. God is dead so he has nothing to say on these matters. Ultimately, bioethics is just the opinion of men and the loudest voices will prevail.

When it comes to altering the human genome, all the megaphones are on the utopians side so that’s what will become “ethical” in the coming years. How that will unfold is a mystery, but my hunch is no one reading this will live long enough to see a race of super intelligent chimps enslaving humanity.