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Stem-cell research and cloning are other cases in which critical thinking makes a difference. If the choice is between discarding stem cells or using them for research that might improve the human condition, what justifies the extreme attitude that they should be pitched? Only the logically unjustifiable conclusion that they are persons could support their burial, which appears to be disrespectful of those of us who might benefit from their use for research. And even cloning—which Congress, in its wisdom, has proscribed—would appear to be perfectly moral as a means for providing infertile couples with offspring that are as closely related to them genetically as is possible. If there is anything disrespectful here, it is in denying them that right. The practice of politics, alas, bears no discernable relationship to logic and evidence.
While The Ethics of Belief enables us to identify beliefs that should not be allowed to influence public policy debates—where the outcomes of those debates affect us all—I do not harbor the illusion that most or even many mortals are capable of embracing its strictures. Freedom of religion combined with democratic procedures can strengthen or weaken our adherence to morality. Ultimately, if we are to emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of ignorance and the influence of religion—when it leads to the suppression of knowledge or to the commission of immoral acts or the restraint of moral ones—it will have to be through a process of strengthening the public schools of this nation as secular institutions committed to educating our younger citizens within the boundaries of what empirical science and rational inquiry render justified as the knowledge of our time.
Religion can serve as motivation for leading a moral life, but it affords no alternative to rationality, which ensures—in the tentative and fallible fashion of science—that our beliefs continue to provide appropriate guidance for our actions and survival as a species.
Jim Fetzer discusses these and related issues in RENDER UNTO DARWIN (2007).
