From a reader:

Mr. Goldberg,
In your most recent post, your interlocutor confuses two very different arguments. He says anti-stem cell types claim you can’t kill embryos because it’s life and God says we can’t take life. On the opposite side of that Fideism, it would seem that pro-stem cell types “are happy to engage in earnest ethical debate over when life begins.” That’s not the case at all, and confuses the common ethical questions.
Embryonic stem cell research doesn’t kill humans because God says it does, but because science says it does. The necessary first question for both sides is “when does human life begin?” The science is clear on this (while the Bible, incidentally, is certainly not at all): it starts at conception. The question then is so what? Does life itself have intrinsic dignity or not? Those are the ethical (and perhaps necessarily religious) questions. But first we must look to the science, then examine the ethics, on both sides. It’s not God vs. Science, but, as I think you pointed out earlier, Science, to What End and at What Cost?
Michael A. Fragoso
Research Assistant
Center for Human Life and Bioethics
Family Research Council