Clones have souls?

If cloning does become a reality then when your mother is yelling at you one day and gives you the curse that all mothers give their children, you know the one " I hope when you grow up you have children just like you", then you got it covered.

 

There's no scientific clone that even comes close to ID twins. And I think we all know such twins who look almost exactly alike, but whose personalities are different as night & day.

Now, why can't science match GOD'S "clones"? Because both ID twins come from the SAME ZYGOTE. Science cannot match that unless/until it learns to cause a one-cell zygote to split perfectly into two one-cell zygotes as God sometimes does. Whether He'll allow man yo do that remains to be seen.

Yes, a clone would have a separate soul, same as his/her source does.

 

Let me be a little more specific. My introductory statement was if you believe the soul comes from the father. To be more specific, the father passes on the sin nature/spirit/soul, whatever you want to call the spiritual side of the new being.

This is called the traducian theory in theology if you want to do some digging on it. The alternatives are that God generates the spiritual side of man at conception, or the spiritual side of man is pre-existant to the conception - reincarnation.

If the father passes on the spirit, then a "TRUE" clone - taking a cell from a being and creating another being just like it, would not seem to have a spirit - no father involved.

I am not suggesting this in any diabolical plan to farm clones for medical purposes - though that could be the reasoning of some!

I am not speaking of invetro nor the extraction of dna from an embryo and insertion of some other dna into it. That is another discussion most likely.

"Clone" originally was to take a cell from a person, and produce another exact replica from that cell. To my knowledge this has not been done as yet, and as has been suggested, I'm not sure that God will allow it to occur - HOWEVER - I think He can do as He pleases, and He may have plans for such a situation

 

All fall under the category of "Man having power over life and death" which bruren was so adverse to.

There are plenty of logical reasons to oppose cloning. Bruren's emotional appeal isn't one of those.

 

I do not believe that souls are physical or that we have souls because of anything physical. So yes, I believe artificial genetic clones will have as much of a soul as natural genetic clones (twins, triplets, etc) the difference between the two being a physical one.

 

So, Gold Dragon, where does the soul/spirit come from and how if not physically?

Not arguing, just interested in your position.

One of the reasons for my thinking is that it answers the question as to why there was a virgin birth.

 

I don't claim to understand the mystery of the soul.

I believe the soul to be related to man being created in the image of God another statement that has nothing to do with our physical bodies since God is not physical and his image would not be physical.

My current position would be that God gives each of us a soul. Whether that happens at conception or after or before, I have no idea. Defining the soul is hard enough without getting into explaining how we have one.

 

I edited my post while you were answering

You are correct, defining the soul is a hard one. I have always defined the three as The body is our world consciousness, our soul is our self consciousness, and our spirit is our God consciousness. Many combine the soul and spirit, but there seems to be a bit of a distinction.

 

I consider the virgin birth to be a witness to the divinity of Christ. I'm not sure what the soul has to do with the virgin birth.

 

Cloning is not procreating. God created us to reproduce. Cloning in no way qualifies.
When they cloned that sheep they had many failures and in the end the sheep died from the fact it was a clone. If you consider clones humans then you advocate the experimentation on humans, even when it causes suffer and death.

If man is created in the image of God, a clone is created in the image of the cell donor. Doesn't seem too awful godly does it.

 

I don't know if the absence or presence of a soul which we cannot detect or define will play a part in the ethical issues of using cloning for organ sources. If a clone is sentient, I believe organ harvesting will be a serious ethical problem whether it has a soul or not.

As for using cloning technology to produce organs for transplant sources, I believe it would be a tremendously valuable technology without ethical problems if it can be done without a sentient being.

This gets into fuzzy ethical territory when clones are specifically made without a head, purely for harvesting organs. Cloning research has been able to successfully clone other organisms without a head. I am unsure of how to ethically approach this situation if it were human.

I believe headless clones should also be ethical problems because the genetic manipulations required are inducing a headless embryo in what would have normally been an intact embryo.

So I guess the ethical line would be whether the organism could have been a fully intact human without intervention.

So producing cloned kidneys that would never have been a fully human is ethically ok. But producing a cloned human while suppressing the growth of everything except the kidneys would be an ethical problem. The end result is the same, a cloned pair of kidneys. But the means is vitally important.

[ November 27, 2005, 10:35 PM: Message edited by: Gold Dragon ]

 

"I consider the virgin birth to be a witness to the divinity of Christ. I'm not sure what the soul has to do with the virgin birth."

All man is of a fallen nature, yet Christ, born of a woman, did not have a fallen nature. There must have been a reason this is possible - the lack of a human father seems the logical answer.

Had Christ been born of Joseph and Mary He would have had a sin nature is the line of thought and that is not possible if He is God. This is why this theory suggests that the sin nature/soul/spirit comes through the father at conception.

There are some that suggest the soul/spirit comes from God at conception. If this is the case then why the virgin birth, not to mention the correctness of God imparting a fallen soul/spirit to each and every child. Some theological problems there to Maybe that is why they call all positions on this "theories"

 

Why couldn't Jesus have been born without sin nature without a virgin birth?

You are suggesting that Jesus was without a sin nature because he was born of a virgin.

I believe Jesus was without a sin nature and born of a virgin because he was divine. I don't believe the virgin birth is necessarily causal of Jesus' lack of a sin nature.

Assuming the causality of sin nature from some physical aspect of birth is what I believe has caused all sorts of theological nonsense about Mary's immaculate conception.

I've always found the Catholic position on the immaculate conception humourous. If Mary could have been immaculately concieved, why couldn't Jesus have been?

 

"Why couldn't Jesus have been born without sin nature without a virgin birth?"

God could have done it anyway He wanted, but we have the Scripture that has information that theology tries to deal with. This is one area where there is little information. I would turn your question around and suggest that the there was a reason for the virgin birth, and that reason might have been the need to have a birth without the natural father. God could have zapped an embryo in an incubator of His design and Christ could have popped out in three days if He had wanted, but He chose to do it the way He did.

"You are suggesting that Jesus was without a sin nature because he was born of a virgin."

That seems a good possibility.

"I believe Jesus was without a sin nature and born of a virgin because he was divine. I don't believe the virgin birth is necessarily causal of Jesus' lack of a sin nature."

Then if he has no sin nature because He is divine is He really truely human? This is the crux. If He is human, and he was, then why didn't he have a sin nature, is the quesiton that needs answered. This theory is one way.

"Assuming the causality of sin nature from some physical aspect of birth is what I believe has caused all sorts of theological nonsense about Mary's immaculate conception."

If the sin nature is not from the aspect of birth, then you suggest God imparts a sin nature to the new child, rather than an inherited nature from Adam.

The Roman church took the line of thought way too far and we have their "immaculate conception" which logically requires an "immaculate conception" for Mary's mother and her mother and so on

"I've always found the Catholic position on the immaculate conception humourous. If Mary could have been immaculately concieved, why couldn't Jesus have been?"

Very true. And, I might add, that is a possibility, but then why no Joseph, why a virgin birth etc. which are facts of the Word.

 

Adam and Eve were human without a sin nature before the fall. That is one example of being truly human without a sin nature.

Sin nature can be inherited without it being a physical inheritance. Maybe God is involved in imparting it somehow. I do not know.

I definitely believe in the virgin birth. But I do not consider that causal of Jesus' lack of a sin nature. I believe the virgin birth was a witness to Jesus' duality of being both divine and human.

 

To get this back on topic.....I understand a clone to be an exact replication of a body. For it to be alive it would have to have a soul in it (imo).

 

"Adam and Eve were human without a sin nature before the fall. That is one example of being truly human without a sin nature."

And you know those are the only two examples, and you know that all following Adam have the sin nature - fact. We are all sinners by Adam.

"Sin nature can be inherited without it being a physical inheritance. Maybe God is involved in imparting it somehow. I do not know."

If you don't know, dig in the Word and find out why.

"I definitely believe in the virgin birth. But I do not consider that causal of Jesus' lack of a sin nature. I believe the virgin birth was a witness to Jesus' duality of being both divine and human."

Didn't quesion you believing in virgin birth. If you don't think it was involved in Christ not having a sin nature that is fine, but you need to find some explanation for all the questions it leaves - Joseph being excluded from the conception process, the virgin birth etc.

Of course the virgin birth is related to his humanity and diety - don't think I ever said such - if you want to believe the God imparted theory of the sin nature, that is great, but there seem to be some answers you need to dig up.

Like I've said, check out a systematic theology and read about the different theories and decide what you believe.

 

Chipsgirl, your understanding of clones is not correct. To be a clone means simply to have the same genetic information. This does not necessarily entail having the same features, or to have the exact same qualities - (there are numerous processes that are independent of the genotype or take into account environmental/random factors, such as immune cells) - for example, identical twins have the same DNA but yet can be differently handed. I have two sets of relatives who are identical twins, and in each case, one of the pair is right handed, and the other left. And they definitely have their own unique souls.

 

Here's my two cents, for what it is worth:

I believe a soul is an intrinsic part of mans creation and is passed even to a clone by means that we don't understand in birthed humans.

I get this idea from Genesis. God breathed the "breath of life" into Adam(and he became a living soul), not Eve. Nowhere does the Bible say that God breathed into Eve the "breath of life". So where did her soul come from? It came from that bit of Adam from which God made her. whatever bit of DNA or flesh that God took from Adam passed a soul along with it.