CRISPR, consumer genomics, machine intelligence, and a warming climate: the live questions now arrive as engineering deadlines, and the traditions answer them divided within themselves as much as between one another.
Tagged: Biology and evolution Computing and AI Ecology and climate Genetics and biotechnology Neuroscience and consciousness Space Buddhist Catholic Hindu
The present era’s questions arrive faster than its institutions. Genomics made ancestry, disease risk, and embryo selection consumer products; CRISPR (2012) made germline editing a technical afternoon’s work and a civilizational question, dramatized by He Jiankui’s 2018 announcement of gene-edited babies and the near-universal condemnation that followed — from scientists and religious bodies in the same breath. Machine intelligence moved from research to infrastructure, and with it the oldest questions in this section — what a person is, what may be delegated, what must never be outsourced — acquired engineering deadlines.
Climate change made ecology a worldview test for every tradition: papal encyclical (Laudato si’, 2015), Orthodox ‘green patriarch’ Bartholomew’s ecological repentance, Islamic and Hindu declarations on climate, and evangelical creation-care movements stand alongside traditions and factions that read the same data through eschatology, economics, or suspicion of the institutions reporting it. The split runs through traditions, not between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ — the pattern this whole section documents.
What distinguishes the contemporary era is the machinery of response: bioethics commissions, interfaith statements, tradition-specific guidelines from bodies like the Pontifical Academy for Life and national fatwa councils, and a growing scholarly field — science and religion studies — whose founding consensus is the complexity this section takes as its baseline. The flashpoints gathered here are the live cases.
The Worldview Stakes
The contemporary frame is plural and institutional at once: no single authority licenses knowledge, so every tradition maintains its own academies, statements, and dissenters, and the public argument happens between documents as much as between persons. This section’s stance register exists because the honest unit of analysis is no longer the civilization or the creed, but the tradition’s recorded answer to a specific technology, with its reasons attached.
Elsewhere on This Site
- Flashpoint: artificial intelligence and human dignity
- Flashpoint: gene editing and the germline
- Compare traditions on a technology
References
- National Academies, Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance (2017)
- Pope Francis, Laudato si’ (2015)
Related Across the Site
- Gene editing and the germline Flashpoint — Easy technique, unconsenting subject, speculative benefit: the 2018 edited babies drew one condemnation in many vocabularies, and the line between somatic therapy and germline design is now the field’s governing border.
- dharma Glossary Term — That which is upheld; order; duty.
- Sanskrit Language — The sacred language of Hinduism and a scriptural language of Buddhism and Jainism: Vedic first, then the classical language of Indian theology.
- St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology Library — An open-access, multi-author theological reference with advanced articles on Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
- Artificial intelligence Technology — The newest entry and already the most argued: Rome’s algorethics, halakhah’s golem, Buddhism’s attention diagnosis, and a secular governance regime — all converging on one refusal, that accountability may not be delegated to the machine.
- Evolution by natural selection Technology — The mechanism that reorganized biology: embraced, adapted, and fought over — usually inside traditions rather than between them, from Asa Gray’s theistic evolution to today’s divided evangelical house.
- Germline gene editing Technology — The technology every framework was waiting for: Rome refuses it, the responsa and the fiqh academies condition it, Hindu and Buddhist evaluations run on intention — and the academies of science govern it while disagreeing about whether it should ever be used.
- Surgical and medical abortion Technology — The register’s most documented case: refused absolutely by Rome and by the evangelical mainstream, governed by ensoulment in the classical fiqh, divided in the responsa by stage and by the mother’s priority, grave in Buddhist and Hindu ethics — each in its own premises, left standing.