Headline: Scientists Capable of Creating Life

This Chicago Tribune headline reads “Scientists poised to create life.” The article talks about how scientists have synthetically assembled a genome “from scratch” of a simple bacteria. “If the experiments are successful, we could enter into a new design phase of biology,” leading scientist J. Craig Venter said. Ironically it is insisted, “Despite such lofty goals, the new study published online in the journal Science does not demonstrate godlike control over life.”

Listen. How is this not playing God?

It is claimed that this kind of thing is ethical because man has been manipulating genes forever. Just look at the Chihuahua. Forget about the fact that breeding dogs is a completely different thing from splicing up DNA at the molecular level in a lab and putting the pieces of the puzzle together however you’d like. But even a Catholic priest agreed, “that the technique need not raise fundamentally new ethical questions.”

Man has been trying to create things apart from God since the beginning of time. In our time it has lead to the declaration that God is dead and the world living life accordingly. Now science is trying to prove that is true by creating life. Hey, if man can create life, then it is proved once and for all that creation doesn’t necessitate a God, right?

Too bad these kinds of experiments actually prove the argument from design. After all, it did take a group of intelligent scientists a number of years to figure out how to break into a cell and rearrange its DNA to create something new. There wasn’t an explosion in the lab that created a new life form.

But besides this, who can say doing something like this is wrong? Ethics is relative these days, isn’t it? That Catholic priest goes on to say, “From a religious point of view the creation of new viruses or bacteria would not necessarily create a huge problem, depending on how they’re used… The two major principles are to do no harm, and do the work respectfully.”

Interestingly, the scientist behind this whole thing relates in his autobiography “a 2003 dinner in Washington, D.C., during which he described the possible risks of his research to a group of President Bush’s senior science advisers. Venter explained he could synthesize a small virus in less than a week, and more deadly microbes such as Marburg and Ebola in about a month. Venter wrote that one Homeland Security official “just sat there, silently mouthing ‘wow’ over and over.”

An Intelligent Design Agnostic

The debate between science and religion rages on: Are the two compatible, or are they completely irreconcilable? In God and the Astronomers, a book exploring the relationship between the science of astronomy and faith, Robert Jastrow wrote the following:

“The scientist has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

It is interesting to note that Jastrow is an agnostic.

The case of Jastrow goes to show that you don’t have to be a Christian fundamentalist to look at the universe scientifically and conclude that something intelligent created it all.

Evolution Beef

I’m pretty tired of reading and hearing accusations that only ignorant people question evolution, and that anyone with half a brain would accept this theory.

Listen.

The theory of evolution is referred to as a theory for a reason. It also has a lot of holes in it. The evolutionist looks at the creationist as stupid for believing in something that doesn’t have all the answers. Yet the evolutionist contends that its theory is still valid even though it hasn’t come close to explaining itself.

The Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1). But you probably already know that.

Besides this point, it takes a truly intelligent and reasoning person to look at science for what it is, and accept that it doesn’t have all the answers. It also takes an intelligent person to look at the facts of a theory and find them wanting. That person has crossed a line and stood up for what is really true, and instead of a parroted answer that we evolved from monkeys and science has proved this (which it hasn’t), using reason has found that maybe there is another answer. This answer may not be an atheistic one. And maybe the Bible does have it right after all.