Monday, September 28, 2009

Synthetic Life

"A common argument used by theists to support their belief in God, is that life is so complicated it can only have been made by God. Often this is accompanied with the assertion that there is a "vital force" that separates living things from non-living things, and that God is the source of this "vital force"

This article starts off with a HUGE claim, the claim that scientists have created life. The funny thing is, however; that right afterwards they spend some time making the argument that a virus is considered a life form. Even today this is still debated, so it's debatable whether or not, assuming they did in fact create a virus, it's considered a life form. Some arguments for why it couldn't be a life form:

  • They do not grow

  • They do not respond to stimuli

  • They do not consume anything for energy

  • They are not made up of cells

  • They are not a member of any kingdom

  • They do not have a metabolism

  • They cannot replicated their genetic information without a host

(Found on http://www.wikianswers.com/ and www.beyondbooks.com/lif72/2c.asp)

Another thing that is somewhat ironic about this, is that they believe by creating it they have show evidence for evolution. To cite Rhoblogy:

intelligent agents working in a controlled (by intelligent agents) lab that was designed by intelligent agents and constructed by intelligent agents intelligently applied this and that chemical and environmental factor, intelligent learned from previous failures and intelligently tweaked this or that. The result? And intelligently-designed virus!

Interesting...

Now, there's one more point I'd like to make. There have been people who have created amino acids and organic compounds from inorganic substances, but there is a major issue. There is absolutely no reason to believe our atmosphere ever contained no oxygen, and when oxygen is present organic compounds cannot be formed. For example, the Miller-Urey experiment used what they thought was the atmosphere of early earth, but just took away oxygen in order to produce organic compounds. They even knew that there is no evidence for the earth having no oxygen originally, but believed we must simply not know how yet because evolution has already been proven correct. (Icons of Evolution)


Rhoblogy's take: http://rhoblogy.blogspot.com/2009/04/evilbiblecom-project-part-3-synthetic.html

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