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What a lost opportunity! When Harriet Miers withdrew as a nominee for the US supreme court, her Christian critics missed out on a chance to show that it is possible to combine integrity and rationality with religious belief. It's an opportunity that these days presents itself all too rarely. Now President Bush has chosen a nominee to please the conservative Christians who operate under the bizarre assumption that faith gives believers special authority on moral issues.
Bush spent weeks under sustained attack for not putting up a hard-line conservative candidate for the supreme court, a siege that eventually broke the Miers nomination. The conservatives' grievance was that Miers, though an evangelical Christian, is not against abortion per se. Indeed, she seems unwilling to use the tenets of her faith to lay down the law on issues of modern ethics. In a 1993 speech unearthed shortly before her nomination was withdrawn, Miers declared that "when science cannot determine the facts and decisions vary based upon religious belief, then government should not act". The hardliners feared she would not vote the "Christian" way on issues such as stem cells and human reproductive cloning, so they got her removed.
Although she didn't say so explicitly, Miers's view seems to be that on many of these issues there is no such thing as a "Christian position". Such a view is correct, and never has there been a greater need for it to be stated explicitly.
Advances in science and technology have thrown up many subjects for debate, but the Bible cannot be said to speak to these issues more clearly than most human beings' moral sense. In fact, those Christians who say their faith somehow gives them special authority on questions of bioethics couldn't be more wrong: they are if anything less well placed than everyone else. That's because, instead of considering the facts of an issue purely on their merits, they are forced to consider also how comfortably these facts sit with their beliefs. They have, in effect, a conflict of interest.
Take the Catholic church's statements on abortion. In 1980, the Catholic archbishops of Great Britain declared that what exists from the time of conception is "not a potential human being, but a human being with potential". On what authority did they base this statement? You won't find it in the Bible: it is an arbitrary judgement call, like most other people's judgements on the issue. Except that it comes from people with a vested interest: a doctrinal position to uphold.
Perhaps the most serious offenders of all are those scientists who claim that being a person of faith gives them special qualification to make judgements on issues of bioethics.
But I have seen no evidence that this group holds any special insight on bioethics. They are no more enlightened than anyone else, whatever they might believe. The issues thrown up by modern biotechnology are unprecedented in their complexity. To pretend that an ancient faith tradition can simplify them is absurd.
The trouble is, as Miers intimated, science and religion have had precious little to say to each other. Earlier this year I was funded by the Templeton Foundation to take time out from my job as an editor at New Scientist to study the interface between science and religion. It was a fascinating and stimulating time, from which I emerged more convinced than ever that attempts so far to reconcile science and religion rest on very shaky ground.
Trying to accommodate religious views in considering the complex and often heartbreaking dilemmas of bioethics can only make the problem more complex, and the results less satisfactory. Maybe the Bible was inspired by God - and there are plenty of debates to be had over what that statement even means - but either way scripture is not a collection of glibly applicable rules, or even necessarily the best available collection of transcribed human wisdom. We have plenty more insights into the human condition and the state of the world; university libraries are crammed with them. When it comes to understanding modern life, there's certainly no rational reason to put more trust in the scriptures than in more recent treatises on what it means to be human.
If a religious lawyer is appointed to the supreme court, or a religious scientist is invited onto a bioethics committee, it should be because they are able to weigh up the issues and use their moral compass without having it compromised by irrational belief. If your faith does not allow you to question the validity of a Bible verse's relevance to issues of modern bioethics, or to sanction abortion in any form, you are not coming to those debates as a scientist or a lawyer: you are coming as a well-informed but partisan lobbyist, and you should say so.
Miers's nomination, for all its questionable aspects, would have provided a welcome break with the Bush administration's habit of assuming that faith has the answers to all moral and ethical questions. Her unwillingness to presume that her religious beliefs had anything to say about complex moral issues is to be applauded.
Holding to a religion is fine if you are that way inclined, but it's not a fast track to wisdom. In many cases, it's exactly the opposite.
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