IS NOTHING SACRED? What's missing in the stem-cell debate.

President George W. Bush's address on stem-cell research and the subsequent commentary made me think of our loss of any visceral sense of wonder, awe, and a feeling for what words like "sacred" mean. "When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?" (Psalm 8). There is awe before the infinite spectacle of the heavens, and awe also before the infinitesimally small; or at least there should be.

I am drawn back to a passage in Pascal's Pensees about the fact that humanity has been placed between infinities, the vastness of the cosmos and the infinitely divisible microcosmos. The human being is nothing compared with the vastness of galaxies, and is enormous in comparison with the atomic and subatomic realms. "Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will now be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is not a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between these two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption."

There is something here about reverence, a sense of the sacred, which has not been heard enough in this debate. Atheistic and agnostic scientists (the late Carl Sagan was one) will often say that they feel awe and a sense of what religious people call the sacred when they encounter the vastness of the universe and the glory of its wonders. But this sense of stillness and awe--a good and valuable aesthetic experience--does not exhaust what believers mean when they speak of an encounter with the sacred. For the believer such an encounter is also a charge; it obligates us.

There has been an interesting tone-deafness where the discussion of embryonic stem cells is concerned. Too frequently reference is made to "a tiny collection of cells," as if the smallness of the embryo at this stage of its development made it unworthy of serious moral consideration or respect. But even among those who acknowledge the awe they feel before the processes that mark the beginning of life, there is still a disagreement that necessarily overlaps with disagreements over such issues as abortion and capital punishment. And the ways in which we address these issues reveal an unbridgeable gap.

To speak of the sacredness of life means more than a respect for its complexity or an admiration of its beauty. If meaning is something that has its source solely in humanity, and if the meaning and value of a life depend only on whether we as human beings choose to value and welcome that life, then the proponents of both abortion and experiments with embryos have a point. The universe itself is meaningless; meaning, from this point of view, is a uniquely human symptom, something we do, something we alone confer. But if life has intrinsic value, something that does not depend on my attitude toward it or my acceptance of it, then I must feel the silence Pascal speaks of. My reverence obligates me. It does not allow me to regard this life, at whatever stage, merely as a means to an end, no matter how noble the end.

But our discussion of this has been to some extent a casualty of the ways in which the idea of the sacred has been shoehorned into the realm of the totally subjective. Religious people are said to be imposing their views on others, where embryonic stem-cell research or abortion is concerned. We are expected to allow a secular approach--one that denies the weight of the sacred--to trump our concerns; this view, after all, is based on "the facts," where the objection to the manipulation of life at this stage is based on "theology."

We should not let ourselves get sidetracked into a discussion of whether one can speak of an embryo as a person. It is certainly the beginning of a human life; it will not, if it finds a womb, grow into a cabbage or a boot. It is what we believe about life at its origin that matters here; and the belief in the sacred should have at least as much weight, even weight in law, as the belief that there is no such thing. Pascal again: "We naturally believe ourselves far more capable of reaching the center of things than of embracing their circumference. The visible extent of the world visibly exceeds us; but as we exceed little things, we think ourselves more capable of knowing them." The problem is less with science and research than with the reverence, or irreverence, with which we approach them. Of course good people can disagree about such things; but the attitude currently most in fashion dictates that one set of good people should always defer to the other, as if there were no reasonable grounds for debate. And on their definition of reason--one that excludes any sense that the sacred is more than an aesthetic consideration--I am afraid there are none.