According to media reports, a team of researchers is on the verge of creating artificial life. DNA specialist Craig Venter, president of the J. Craig Venter Institute in the U.S., is “poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form [a synthetic chromosome] on Earth,” reported the UK’s Guardian.

Georgia Purdom, a geneticist at Answers in Genesis–U.S., observes that, in this instance, life is not being created from “scratch”—it is being “rebuilt.” In assembling this man-made chromosome, scientists (using their intelligence, it should be noted) use a sequence that is modeled after a preexisting bacterial chromosome, which uses preexisting DNA bases. Then they place the chromosome into a preexisting bacterial cell.

In other words, concludes Purdom, all the components already existed. She adds that these components were created instantaneously by God, not through the many years of toiling by scientists.

* Ed Pilkington, “I Am Creating Artificial Life, Declares U.S. Gene Pioneer,” Guardian (UK), October 6, 2007.