Playing God?

Library Journal

Peters, the author of Sin (LJ 4/1/94) and author or editor of eight other semipopular books on science, theology, and New Age religion, was funded by the National Institutes of Health to look into ethical and theological aspects of the Human Genome Project, an attempt to map the human gene structure. Here he debunks the "myth" that our lives are controlled by genes or some combination of genetics and environment, further arguing that we need a theology of freedom. Only fanatics will find his analyses unreasonable, but readers will notice that the book depends on two kinds of sentencesscientific and theological. Scientific sentences score points when they report data verifiable by methods the scientific community approves. But what of theological sentences? Must they report the will of the scriptural God, draw on Judeo-Christian tradition (as Peters thinks), or just be reasonable? Peters adds his theological score to the scientific score, which is like adding basketball scores to baseball scores. He hints that science and theology are part of a larger game defined by Western culture, but this would introduce cultural relativism into both. Even then, would they add up? For comprehensive collections only.Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa, Canada