CB, a guest blogger, shares with us:
I have been giving this question some thought since my daughter shared with me an article from LiveScience.com entitled “Life As We Know It Nearly Created in Lab”.
The hand of man has willfully, purposefully, altered the genome of crops and animals for thousands of years to suit its purposes. In our recent life time, we have witnessed artificial intelligence, our mechanical devices wondering barren fields of other worlds, two even leaving our vast solar system entirely, and the artificial cloning of mammals. We can freeze human embryos for decades, and thereby my son and my great-grandson can be delivered by the same unrelated woman at the same time. Let’s pause for a moment to appreciate just how bizarre and “unnatural” that really is.
If we create new life forms in much the same way as God has; as this article implies, with random molecules, forming random proteins and enzymes, further on to RNA and DNA – all subjects of which I, with a post-graduate degree, have only a rudimentary understanding of. Then is there a difference between life created by man and that created by God?
Such a life, so created by the hands of man, could then evolve in response to outside forces such as a hungry neighbor, climate change resulting from the natural rhythm of the earth’s rotation or an ill-timed collision by some stray piece space born rock, thus encouraging an adaptation (i.e., its evolution) in the same randomness experienced by all life that is now and ever was on this planet. Of course unlike God, the luxury of patience has not been engineered in our nature. We could not wait 4.5 Billion years to see what unfurls from our own creation. I imagine then we would encourage the process of adaptation as quickly as possible, thus allowing us to witness evolution first hand as only God has.
Now once such a life, a life created and evolved by the hand of man, becomes self-aware, would it have a soul – if there is such a thing?
We have engineered ways to artificially split human eggs to produce twins or more. No one I know would suggest that these twins share one soul or that one or the other is lacking a soul. Isn’t an identical twin essential a “naturally occurring” clone? I say “naturally” only because we have not yet found the catalyst within our DNA that make some people predisposed to producing twins (or maybe we have).
Cultures throughout history and the world over have expressed God in a human form, only far more superior and capable in every way imaginable to them at the time. Perhaps man has known all along that such a vision is indeed its own destiny.
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