Should We Play God?

This is one of the most emotive and simulaneously useless questions that is constantly asked, or often turned into the statement "We should not play at being God." The latter statement takes the view that it is axiomic that playing at being God is bad. Reading the Old Testament seems to me to be ample evidence (if we grant just for a sentence that God exists) that God is no more moral than humanity and indeed the main criteria for deciding whether people should live or die seems to depend not on their actions but whether they choose to indulge His whims. So in the first instance I would argue that the assumption that we are inherently worse at doing Godlike things is flawed.

The assumption behind the question is also flawed from a logical perspective. For an action to be of God it is inherently supernatural and hence we are unable to accomplish it by definition. If we can do something, it is natural by definition and is accomplished by science and technology at whatever level of knowledge is required. There is nothing supernatural about the fusion bomb or genetics, for example.

And that brings me to the important point, which is not how valid the question is, but the effect that asking it has. The use of it is an attempt to frame an argument in religious and emotive terms with the concurrent assumption that if you are playing at God (in a usually ill-defrined way) then what you are doing must be therefore inherently wrong and should be stopped. It may well be, and often is, true that the action in question should certainly be reviewed and discussed with regard to ethics, but based on the evidence and risks involved. The playing God argument attempts to sidestep this in an attempt to impose a certain world view based purely on a certain interpretation of a religious text. Unfortunately, despite all its flaws, it is not an argument that can ever be ignored and one that must be actively countered as its emotive content, and its short cut to a cultural reference, will and does short circuit critical thinking in many people.