Monday, June 08, 2009

EvilBible.com Project, Part 3 - Synthetic Life

(My previous posts on evilbible.com)
(Vox Veritatis' previous posts on evilbible.com)
(Atheism Is Dead's previous posts on evilbible.com)
(Blue3's post on evilbible.com)

Continuing with the project (and this may be my last post on this topic, at least for a while), EvilBible.com departs from its stated purpose in the article "Synthetic Life".

They say:
A common argument used by theists to support their belief in God, (sic) is that life is so complicated that it could have only been made by God. Often this is accompanied with (sic) the assertion that there is a "vital force" that separates inanimate objects from living things, and that God is the source of this "vital force".


Hmm, perhaps it is common, and I guess I don't know what to think about this, actually. I don't know if it's a big deal either way, whether human scientists are able to create synthetic life forms at some point in the future or not. I kind of doubt it will happen, but I've been wrong before, to be sure.
A few observations about this page.

1) How is this article furthering the site's goal of proving that the Bible is evil?
2) It's amusing to watch the author start off with a lofty assertion - that humans have created life - and then proceed almost directly into a couple of serious qualifications:

Some people will probably say that a virus is not a living thing, but that all depends on how you define life. Clearly a simple virus is not as complex as a mammal, but it does have much more properties associated with living things than properties associated with inanimate objects.


Yes, it certainly does matter how we "define life". No less an authority than ERV [/tongue-half-in-cheek] recently interacted with a paper on that topic, interestingly. She is in agreement with EB.com here, that viruses are a life form...and yet the paper she's responding to was the one published in Nature magazine; she wasn't. Point is, it's still a controversy, 7 years after the study EB.com cites.

3) EB.com no doubt believes that this experiment is evidence that life does not require a God to create it, and by further implication that life could have possibly evolved from non-life by natural processes. They don't say this explicitly; I'm inferring a bit from every other atheist I've ever encountered.
As far as the former assertion goes, fair enough. Perhaps I'd be willing to grant that, for now, with the previous 2 qualifications firmly in mind.
But if EB.com affirms that naturalistic, unguided evolution is responsible for not only life's arising out of non-living material and for the variety of organisms we see today arising from a common ancestor, they need to consider that this experiment actually provides evidence AGAINST that claim and FOR the idea of an intelligent designer. Think about it - 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, intelligently learned from previous failures and intelligently tweaked this or that. And the result? An intelligently-designed virus!
I don't suppose the authors of EB.com are some of those atheist-yet-conscientious-objectors to evolution that would agree with the famous Discovery Institute list of objecting scientists, are they?

At any rate, though evidencing an intelligent designer is not identical to evidencing the God of the Bible, it lends support thereto rather than chipping at its foundation. Many thanks to EB.com for this, at least.

1 comment:

NAL said...

Rho:

Point is, it's still a controversy, 7 years after the study EB.com cites.

The paper Ten reasons to exclude viruses from the tree of life was published in Nature Reviews Microbiology April 2009.

Rho:

3) EB.com no doubt believes that this experiment is evidence that life does not require a God to create it, ...

What experiment? The paper was an OPINION piece.

Rho:

At any rate, though evidencing an intelligent designer is not identical to evidencing the God of the Bible, it lends support thereto rather than chipping at its foundation.

Not identical? That's an understatement. An intelligently designed car, life form, etc., offers zero support for a supernatural entity.