Listening to a recent archive of Reason To Believe's Creation Update program. Fazale Rana PhD is discussing a current initiative in the field of Synthetic Biology to create "artificial life." The team of scientists aim to map out a synthetic genome and put it into a cell without DNA to create "microplasm labotoreum", an organism that currently doesn't exist in nature. At first blush it sound like something for moral concern, but in effect what they're doing is taking parts from a very basic organism, throwing out the non-essentials, and reassembling the parts to form a new, simple organism. It's like ripping apart a lawnmower engine, taken out the parts that are unnecessary, and rebuilding a lawnmower that you hope will work. Which is not to say that what these scientists are doing is not remarkable--as it turns out, this lifeform they are looking to make still requires a mindblowingly large gene sequence.
Rana couldn't avoid mentioning the irony that some of the brightest scientists in the world have spent years working on this project, which they're not even sure will work, and yet nontheists are unquestioningly willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to blind unguided random processes bringing life about.
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