The mystery remains: what cloning can't reproduce.

Years ago Gore Vidal said that he thought human beings had already been cloned. "Anyone who says 'Have a nice day' is a clone," he said. "There's a big loaf of them and they just keep slicing them off."

When a Scottish researcher cloned a sheep recently, the event set off another round of joking, some of it quite funny; it also led, predictably, to serious comments by ethicists, theologians, and scientists. Almost everyone seems to assume that human beings will one day be cloned, and that the uses to which cloned humans might be put range from the nightmarish to the ludicrous. People could be grown for body parts - a liver with your exact DNA would probably not need an anti-rejection drug if it were transplanted. One startling suggestion was that a dying child could be cloned, as a sort of replacement kid. There were other ethical problems: a number of fertilized embryos were destroyed along the way toward cloning the sheep.

In an article in the New York Times Gustav Niebuhr quoted Notre Dame's Richard McCormick, who said that the obvious motives for cloning a human were "the very reasons you should not." To attempt to create people with specific characteristics is to make single or multiple aspects of being human more important than the "beautiful whole that is the human person." This gets it about right, I think. A more alarming sentiment was expressed by Nancey Murphy of the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. She said she hoped that ethicists "would concentrate their efforts on saying what we should do with this, rather than saying it shouldn't be done, because people have rightly said it can't be prevented."

How's that? If something can be done and will be done we shouldn't say that it shouldn't be done? Apply that to genocide or euthanasia. Or for that matter the torture of small children. Knowing that adultery and murder will happen does not lead us to ask how they can best be used; we have to say these things shouldn't be done at all. The role of the ethicist is not to refrain from such judgments, but very often to make them.

Some things are clear: A cloned human being is still a human being, with all sorts of individual complications. In essence, cloning is the artificial fashioning of an identical twin, one that will be younger than its sibling. As in the case of identical twins, the similarities will be intriguing, but so will the inevitable differences.

The real danger is the way the process moves us ever closer to the idea of the human being as product or property. Prisoners in China have been used as involuntary organ donors. A doctor I know has been asked more than once to determine the sex of an unborn child; if the child turned out to be a female, the parents planned to abort it. There is something Nazi-like about wanting to create "desirable" human beings, but we already use people as if they were property (as in the case of the prisoners) or try to create desirable children (as in the case of people who prefer male to female babies). The argument that we have a right to choose our time of death or to abort a child is similar: "Whose life, or whose body, is it anyway?" Our answer must be: not yours, not mine, and not the state's. The body is not a form of property at all, except to a slavemaster.

There are ethicists who have no problem with the idea of cloning itself, but who worry only about its potential for misuse. This strikes me as being tone-deaf to mystery, to any sense of the sacred. The loss of this sense is almost a hallmark of our age, and in some sense the churches have been complicit in it. When churchgoers cannot find any sense of the sacred or of mystery in liturgy, where will they begin to learn to see it in natural processes or the physical world? "Mystery" has taken on a muddled meaning: it is either the "booga booga" stuff that hovers around such TV shows as "The X Files," or it is seen as something so far beyond understanding that we might as well not think about it at all.

But the sense of mystery and glory to be found in the best music (Bach or Arvo Part) and in the stillness at the heart of the vision of some wonderful painters and iconographers (Giotto or Andrei Rublev) can be experienced in the presence of natural phenomena, and should be. A reverence for mystery does not put a stop to our understanding or our desire to understand; rather, this desire is deepened. The desire to know is experienced in a context marked by deep humility and gratitude. A sense of the sacred, the ability to be still before the mystery, is something which locates us exactly: we are where we are meant to be, who we are meant to be, in such moments.

When science becomes exclusively reductionist, it loses this sense. But it doesn't need to. Retaining this sense of wonder could lead a scientist to say, "Yes, we can do this; it would be interesting, and wrong." The problem here is partly the confusion of science with technology. That something can be done obviously does not mean that it should be; but without a restoration of the sense of the sacred, of mystery, we will probably not be able to begin to make that argument, or even to understand it ourselves.