Hi Flyer,
we will always claim that God is the only one who can create life, but there's a stipulation to that. We don't believe that he's the only one that can create life, we believe that he's the only one that can create life out of nothing.
A fair enough point. Of course, any attempt to create artificial life would have to make that life out of
something... I don't think that this new process speaks directly to that kind of issue though. This was not an abiogenesis experiment. It took a pre-existing cell and gave it new DNA coding, artificial coding, but the experiment does not address the origins of that cell.
I guess I don't see the heel turn in this.
It just seems to me that for as long as there is no artificial life, creationists will cite this as evidence for a "designer", but as soon as any scientist succeeds in any step towards artificial life, this too will be seized upon as evidence for a designer...
Are you denying in your post that thus far, in science, everything that has been created has had a designer (a scientist)??? I mean, this is certainly a scientific feat we are talking about here and it should astound us all, but it did require a PhD scientist, who's name will be forever linked to the discovery, to come up with this.
Subbie has already mentioned some non-designed objects. I would also like to point out that this experiment was not about a genome being formed through unguided processes. It was all about producing a designer genome. That doesn't really have much bearing upon how naturally occurring genomes came about. Possibly it might impact on some kind of vitalist thinking.
As far as the rock scenario goes that Rhavin spoke of, my answer to that is yes, I would conclude a designer, if the rock pile showed design.
What about these rocks?
Do they look designed? They're not. They are produced by frost.
If you are going to say that something "looks designed", you need to have some kind of objective way of testing this, so that you can apply it to any ambiguous cases. It is not always obvious what is designed and what is not.
I personally feel that even the smallest know particle shows design.
By those standards, is there anything that does not look designed?
The problem with this scenario is that one could design a rock pile, to look like it wasn't designed in the first place, yet it was still designed.
Yes, that is true, but there are a couple of problems with applying this argument to the case of evolution; to most biologists, life
doesn't look designed, it looks like it arose through unguided evolution; and if God had designed life
in such a way as to look evolved, it would be deeply dishonest.
Mutate and Survive