After all, Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring” and a pioneer in the environmental movement, once said, “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.”

“Convenience of man”? Try “necessity.”

It’s precisely because of our “fooling with nature” that we’ve survived as a species.

When man first evolved, his extinction seemed imminent. Unlike other members of the animal kingdom, he had no claws, fangs, or any other adequate defense. He was weaker and slower than top predators, and he lacked all the advantages of common prey.

In a world where only the most physically powerful survived, humans would’ve died out. Fortunately, our species has been kept alive by its advantage over all competing life forms -- the faculty of reason.

This is our ability to think and reshape our environment to suit our own needs with knowledge drawn from the past. In the harsh wilderness, humans survived by using their natural surroundings for their own benefit.

They carved tools out of stone, and ignited fires to cook their food and illuminate the night sky. They used trees to build shelters to protect themselves from the elements.

All this was accomplished through “exploiting” the wilderness for their own purposes, or “manipulating nature,” and thereby “playing God.”

If man hadn’t decided to use trees, rocks, and fire for his own selfish purposes, where would we be?

This trend of restructuring nature for our own profit has been carried into the present, in all forms of technology, from agriculture to industrialization to the advent of the Internet.

Companies drill for oil and mine coal -- both of which are the fossilized remains of long-dead organisms -- to generate the electricity that powers our machines, which have parts that are composed of minerals dug from the earth.

Electricity and such machines are often essential for doctors when they are performing surgery on their patients. Is that not “playing God” with nature?

Right now, in the Third World, 2 million children die and .5 million become blind annually because they don’t receive enough Vitamin A.

To combat this problem, Swiss scientists have “played God” by genetically engineering “golden rice,” which contains enough Vitamin A to prevent such suffering around the world.

Is that unethical?

To ban this technology, out of mere presumptions of guilt, is to consign millions of children to needless death.

If we stagnate or reverse technological growth in what is supposed to be a mostly free economy, what’s to become of us?

We may believe that, with our current dominance in the food chain, there is no longer need to continue advancement. That’s far from true.

Germs are our natural predators, and they evolve at an alarming rate -- faster than that of any other sort of life form. They constantly develop new methods of protecting themselves from our antibiotics, mutating into strains even more difficult to treat.

Should we refuse to find new ways to stop them, it would mean the death of us in the long run.

If not for our ability to use the natural world for our own convenience, our species may not even have survived as long as it has, and many more lives would be lost, both in the present and in the future.

Contrary to much of today’s rhetoric, technological progress is not unethical. Rather, it is a moral necessity.

When we look at scientists and businessmen, they may “manipulate nature,” but all those forms of nature happen to be their own property.

What of the “bio-ethicists” and environmentalists violating other people’s property rights through their attempts to prohibit certain forms of technology?

As novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand observed in “The Fountainhead”: “The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.”

It would be more accurate to say that, by interfering with the lives of others, it is the anti-progress “bio-ethicists” who are really the ones playing God.

"Playing God -- A Moral Necessity" is a modified version of an editorial of the same name that was published in the July 2000 issue of the "Hawaii Libertarian" newsletter.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com (If you would like to continue seeing Stuart Hayashi's editorials on this site, please let Hawaii Reporter know at info@hawaiireporter.com)

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