Dear sir,
This week the news service informed us that scientists had created synthetic life, which, on the face of it, sounds very impressive, but the details were hardly supportive of the claim.
Scientists in the Craig Venter Institute, California, managed to very cleverly insert an artificial chromosome into a bacterial cell, which then proceeded to replicate. I do not for a moment consider this achievement as minor, but a careful analysis of what actually happened reveals that despite the claims, life was not created.
What the scientists did was interpret information already pre-existing in a bacterial chromosome, then use already existing yeast cells to take advantage of already designed cellular machinery. They used these pre-existing cells and the already encoded information in the DNA, and the built in design in these atom-sized machines did the rest.
So the information in the cells they began with was already there, and the process used relied on chemical and molecular processes already programmed into the materials. Hardly what I would call the creation of life.
To use the word “create” correctly, the scientists would need to begin with nothing, that is, absolutely nothing. They would then need to make atoms and molecules out of nothing, stringing them together the right way to produce matter with intelligent design built into it, and construct matter in a multi-dimensional way conducive to many different uses. From these materials they would then have to build a cell complex enough to qualify as living, that is, able to replicate, utilize energy to move and grow, and respond to its environment.
If Venter’s team ever does make a complete cell, even from pre-existing materials, it will demonstrate that when God did it by His spoken word of power, He used intelligence, not evolution, to design and construct the world we live in.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Gunther
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