Creationalism: What is "Natural?"

One thing that I have found really interesting from our discussion in class is this idea of creationalism how it relates to defining what is “natural” versus “unnatural.” I believe that the basic consensus in class was that Mary Shelley was using the lack of mothers to define those that are “unnatural beings” namely the monster and Frankenstein. The monster was of an unnatural birth as be didn’t come from woman and was thus brought into the world without any familial connections. Frankenstein’s mother died when he was young and thus he didn’t have a constant feminine figure in his life. The story infers that it is this lack of feminine exposure during development creates a being of who is over ambitious and passionate to a fault.

This idea of defining what is “natural” made me think of science today as a whole. In my opinion, it is obvious the creature Frankenstein created is not natural. For one thing, what was done is impossible but more importantly the creature was never born. He never went through adolescence and started life as an adult. He didn’t start as single celled organism created by the union of an egg and sperm cell.

So that made me wonder, are genetically engineered organisms “natural?” Cloned animals start from a single diploid somatic cell (non sex cell) to develop into a baby, an adolescent, and finally an adult. So according to my argument above, clones are not natural beings, but they are close. I think that most people, myself included, would say that clones are unnatural.

If we assume that a clone is unnatural what does this say about the issue dealt with in the novel My Sister’s Keeper? This is the story of a human person who was genetically engineered to be a bone marrow match for her sister. This young girl went through all the same developmental processes as the rest of us and even was carried for nine months inside of a mother’s womb, but was conceived in a laboratory. And if we define this as unnatural, does the definition also demand that individuals conceived through artificial insemination are unnatural? Artificially insemination does not mean that the genetic information of the embryos was altered. So theoretically, under the correct conditions, those births may have been possible without outside help.

For every question that I tried to answer as far as defining what is a natural creation, it instead just lead me to more and more questions. Do you have another definition of what is “natural?”