Thursday, August 30, 2007

Life as we know it

I recently read an article about scientists who are working to create life in the lab. (The Flint Journal, August 26, 2007, Scientists edge ever closer to creating life from the lab)

According to Jack Szostak, a leader in the field from Harvard, they must overcome three obstacles--creating a container for the cell, establishing a genetic system to control its functions, and developing a metabolism that can extract food and change it into energy.

Szostak goes on to admit that "We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work, and then we figure out what happened."

I know scientists can do amazing things, but creating life from scratch? Why would they even want to try?

Well, the purpose, as outlined in the article, said "several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste."

Whatever scientists happen to create, man is not God and we simply cannot create with the perfection that God does. Missing from the clinical aspects of creation is God's hand. The creation of "that first cell from synthetic life" is purely man's design, not God's.

There are people who argue that we should do whatever we can because God is the one who gives us the wisdom, but that is ridiculous when you consider that God also gives us discernment between good and evil, and if we are not humble, we can easily be led astray. Wisdom in discernment hasn't proven to be one of our strong points so far. We must try to walk the delicate balance between science and the dignity and protection of human life.

Science alone is not an evil, of course, but it could be our fall, once again!

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