Thoughts on Easter

On this coming Easter Sunday we will rejoice in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a moment visited by angels from the afterlife delivered to us by the almighty power of God. The Easter stories of the rolled away stone and empty tomb will be retold and the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke will be recited where Jesus, the son of God, died for our sins and “was carried on high into heaven.”
The Easter story is the founding miracle of the earth’s greatest religion. It is the source of the meaning of life and spiritual faith for billions of Christian followers. The ancient gospels have stood the tests of agnostic doubt, anti-Christian scorn and centuries of scientific challenges.
Archeologists, theorists, physicists, biologists and the greatest of theologians and philosophers have sought physical proof of Jesus’ resurrection to heaven after being killed on the cross and buried by Roman soldiers. The Shroud of Turin, his burial cloth, has been subjected to repeated chemical tests.
The Easter miracle can not be disproved. It is ultimately confirmed by our power of faith. Great scientific minds such as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and many others have surrendered their greatest intellectual powers to the glory of God, a supernatural force that is greater than man and all his modern inventions, laboratory experiments and interstellar explorations.
Only Jesus, the son of God, can promise us a life after death. Birth, the creation of a new human being, is sacred. As with Jesus, our life on Earth is very short. Our strongest faith in heaven will not remake our biological origins or human outcomes.
Only God can create life, but that is not as true as it once was.
Our belief in the Easter story may not be swayed, but new bioscience techniques have brought us to an age where individual men and women now possess godlike powers to create new forms of life and to pre-manufacture human embryos.
Last week, a group of leading biologists called for a world-wide moratorium on the use of a new genetic engineering tool that could alter human DNA and forever change a person’s heredity. Already, some scientists have successfully spliced new DNA into monkeys, adding new traits to their germline. This is different from “gene therapy.” This is about making a “new” monkey with an all-new heredity.
Protesting scientists want big questions about safety, ethics and morals answered before the experiments are allowed to progress using human subjects. “In our view, genome editing in human embryos could have unpredictable effects on future generations. This makes it dangerous and ethically unacceptable,” said Edward Lanphier, a bioscience industry leader.
“I personally think we are just not smart enough — and won’t be for a very long time — to feel comfortable about the consequences of changing heredity, even in a single individual,” said David Baltimore, a former president of the California Institute of Technology.
Man has been splitting genes in plants and animals since 1977, when a previous moratorium temporarily halted the march of modern bioscience. The same ethical fears being raised today were heard then — and still have note been answered. When man learned to split the atom, he made the atom bomb. Can we trust putting gene-splitting powers in these same hands?
The power to create — or destroy — life is an ominous threshold. It should not be crossed in the pursuit of godlike powers or for material riches as we have seen in GMOs (genetically modified organisms.)
Perhaps one day, our scientific discoveries will supercede the Easter story of resurrection and god’s dominion over the creation of all life.
On this Easter, we don’t think we are ready just yet to take God’s place.
— Rollie Atkinson