Before I go further:
- I'm not interested in the ethics of cloning in this post, whatsoever.
- Also, I do not think the fact that cloning is possible is a threat to our faith.
- I'm not slamming or insulting the field of cloning; I have no hostilities to vent against cloning.
I don't have an ax to grind, I simply want to draw attention the failures of cloning to make a case for a Creator. I'm guessing within a 100 years cloning will probably be a snap, maybe not, but I can't see why not. That cloning will improve isn't the issue. The issue is, as I see it, we have intelligent beings in sterilized and temperate environments "trying" in earnest to accomplish (with preexisting materials from accessible life forms) what the naturalist claims could happen through time + chance + matter = happy accident...
I recently heard that only 2 to 3% of all laboratory controlled cloning experiments actually produce a living organism... and only 30 to 33% of that 2/3% survive! Maybe this is why the Germans banned all human cloning back in the 1990's?
So, think about how we are advanced enough to send people to the moon, build nuclear bombs, and build skyscrapers to impossible heights. That analogy fails, you say rightly so, because we're supposed to be talking about life, carbon based, amino acid energized life-forms. Okay.
We are advanced enough to save premature babies. We transplant organs; we regenerate livers from halves from living donors too. We have sophisticated MRI's that give us images sliced to 1/64th of an inch that can peer into the deepest part of the human anatomy... We do marvels with cancer, comparatively speaking. We've beaten polio. We have curbed the ravaging devastation HIV causes, prolonging lifespans of its victims by decades. We can artificially inseminate. Yet, we can't clone successfully, when the pieces are all laid out.
The equipment for cloning is not is as extravagant as you might imagine. An NPR piece reported the equipment for cloning could easily be purchased and stored in your basement... The materials for cloning are easily harvested, ample, accessible... Yet, in lab trial after lab trial the results are horrendously catastrophic. Most, again 90% plus specimens, don't survive. A mass majority of those that do spark life are hideously deformed. Most attempts are terminal. And, in light of this, we are supposed to think life "just happened" like a Nike slogan "Just do it"? Again, how could life spontaneously and accidentally spark into existence unguided, when with our guidance and utilizing existing building blocks for life, we are unable to do so?
Life forms, of any complexity, simply defy science's abilities to replicate with any consistency. Yet, we are surrounded by life forms that follow the double helix blueprints of DNA (mysteriously replicated by RNA) and that complex-language-encoded method was able to develop on accident???
Here's the rub: According to a naturalistic and atheistic worldview, a lifeless universe in a chaotic harsh environment, shackled and hindered by the burden of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) birthed untold numbers of life forms. Why is this hard to fathom? In a controlled laboratory with all of the building blocks at hand we can't achieve success at replicating life on any consistent basis? This is without considering an unemotional universe birthing the full range of joy, happiness, anger, despair, and every emotion between. Or non-thinking non-living atoms generating intelligence, logic, and creativity?
I think the problematic, Sisyphean tale of cloning lends more credence to a Creator than perhaps any of our sciences. An uncontrolled, unguided, deaf-dumb-and-blind universe that's generating life, with living creatures that appreciate beauty and feel a sense of purpose all supposedly being a cosmic accident stretches the imagination beyond creditably, far past credulity.
No comments:
Post a Comment