We can play God -- July 21, 2006

Carlton Vogt's

Enterprise Ethics

Volume 4 Number 18 July 21, 2006

We can play God

Despite those who say we can't, we do it all the time

"God heard the embattled nations sing and shout

'Gott strafe England!' and 'God save the King!'

God this, God that, and God the other thing —

'Good God!' said God, 'I've got my work cut out!'"

--Sir John Collings Squire

I've been spending a lot of time discussing logical fallacies lately. They're important, because it's logic, good logic, that gets us to acceptable conclusions in ethics. Today, I want to discuss something that, while not a formal logical fallacy, pops up often enough to cloud rational debate, making its examination worthwhile. And, that’s the claim that "we can't play God."

Often delivered in stentorian tones, it's presented as a "gotcha" argument and is designed, at least in the mind of the person using it, to foreclose any further discussion on the matter. Unfortunately, instead of being the lead-pipe clincher it's thought to be, it's actually the weakest conceivable argument against something.

In fact, when I was teaching medical ethics, I could set my watch -- or at least my semester calendar -- by when some student would shout it out, with book-slamming finality. I would do my best to suppress a grin, mostly because it played right into the next part of my lecture. In short, I was prepared.

Most of my students were in the college nursing program. So, I would tell them that not only can we "play God," this is exactly what they were preparing to do. "Every time you fill a syringe with an antibiotic and inject it into a patient," I would tell them, "you have decided that one life form should die in order that another life form should survive. That's as close to 'playing God' as you can come -- adjudicating territorial disputes among competing life forms."

I have to admit that once I was left speechless when a student nurse responded that "there's no way you can consider bacteria a life form." I resisted the urge to say something mean, as my professors in a long-ago time would have done, and instead merely suggested that she might want to check that out with her biology professor. I reminded her that if scientists found bacteria on the moon or on Mars, they would be dancing in the streets -- the scientists, not the bacteria -- because they had "found life" somewhere else in the solar system.

We were treated to a vibrant round of "We Can't Play God" rhetoric this past week when the issue of stem cell research came up. A lot of it came from people who have no problem with "playing God" by bombing innocent civilians into oblivion and flippantly relegating the victims to "collateral damage" status, although its never quite clear which worthy goal the human damage is "collateral" to.

Now, I have to disclaim my personal bias here. I have a view of the deity that differs markedly from the mass-market religion that has become trendy of late. I don't see the godhead micromanaging things here on earth, especially the minute details of day-to-day living among humans. If so, I would be terribly disappointed that the situation in the Mid-East seems to be causing untold misery for hundreds of thousands of people, while the deity busies itself by spinning the wheels for the old lady who I once saw make the sign of the cross -- with a gaming chip, no less -- over a slot machine at the local casino. And if the deity is occupying itself with deciding the outcome of gaming machines, then the local Indians must truly be the chosen people, because they are the only ones winning.

I also refuse to believe that the deity is directly involved -- despite the on-field, and more importantly on-camera, religious gymnastics -- when an overpaid baseball player hits a home run, especially when said player is batting .260. You'd think if the deity were involved, godly self-respect would keep the player's average closer to, say, .325. And no deity worth its halo would race around the country on a Friday night deciding high-school football games, while parts of the world seem to be spinning out of control.

But, having said that, the fact of the matter is that most people use the "can't play God" gambit when they want to oppose something, and don't have a better argument. So, basically, it's a desperation ploy and completely ignores the fact that we dabble in life-and-death situations all the time without the least qualm.

A couple decides to have a baby. That's creating life. They're "playing God."

Someone collapses to the ground without pulse or respiration. By at least one, and admittedly crude, metric that person is clinically dead, but we proceed to performing CPR in an attempt to reverse the situation -- i.e., bringing the dead back to life. That's "playing God."

I'm contemplating putting traps in my back yard to get the rats who have been eating my grapefruit. Rats are part of a complex ecosystem that I don't really understand. I'm going to interfere in some way with that ecosystem. Probably I'm "playing God" by deciding that grapefruit are more important than rats -- or just deciding, since I don't really eat the grapefruit, that rats are just "icky" and therefore candidates for godly smiting.

We recently had devastating and tragic wildfires not far from my house (far enough for me to be safe, thanks for asking, but I could see the smoke from my back yard). Now, wildfires are also a necessary and beneficial part of the ecosystem. Before humans built homes there, fires would regularly rage through these areas. Moving quickly, the fires would destroy the underbrush. as well as weak and dead trees, leaving the big healthy trees -- spaced well apart -- to survive.

By putting the fires out, we allow the underbrush to build up, and smaller, weaker trees to crowd the spaces. This makes future fires more likely and more devastating, partly because with all the fuel, they don't move as fast, destroying healthy trees along with the weak -- not to mention houses and barns. So, I could argue that those who put out the fires and frustrate the natural order of things are "playing God."

I could go on -- but fortunately for you I won't -- with at least a hundred other examples in which we tinker with natural processes, many of which we don't understand very well, to bring about some result that serves our personal goals.

So, you have several choices. You could agree with me that the godhead doesn't interfere in the day-to-day affairs of humans (or animals) in a micromanaging sort of way. In that case, the idea of "playing God," and a prohibition against it, just don't make any sense.

However, if you're attracted to the idea of God as cosmic chess-player, deciding who hits the lottery, who wins a slot-machine jackpot, or who gets hit by a truck on the way home from work, then we humans "play God" all the time. To trot out this argument randomly merely to oppose something you don't like for other indefinable or unsupportable reasons is pretty weak.