I remember a couple of years ago the Vatican made a curious
announcement about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
Clearly,the Roman Catholic Church was getting worried that any
discovery of evidence of life on other planets would undermine its
authority on Earth. It wanted to head off the impact of that
potentially devastating discovery even before it happened.
"Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on Earth, there can
be other beings, even intelligent, created by God," said the Rev.
Jose Gabriel Funes, the Vatican's chief astronomer and scientific
adviser to Pope Benedict.
"This is not in contrast with our faith because we can't put limits
on God's creative freedom," Funes declared, writing in the Vatican
newspaper, L'Obsservatore Romano, in 2008.
Many scientists find it strange that it would take the discovery of
aliens to provide a strong challenge to religious explanations of
creation: They would say such explanations are already discounted.
But that's the way it goes.
And now there has been a scientific breakthrough that has gone
further even than aliens: If you wanted to be dramatic, you could
say it destroys the concept at the very heart of religion, from
Christianity to Buddhism: the soul.
I'm talking about the creation last month of a synthetic cell. Dr.
J. Craig Venter and his teams built an artificial genome using a
computer sequence and a bunch of chemicals, then transplanted that
genome into an emptied cell. When they "booted up" the genome, the
new cell came to life.
Sure, it's "only" a bacterium, but much of the media coverage of
the publication of the paper describing the breakthrough led with
the "shocking" angle that Venter had been "playing God."
No one bothers to say that we've been "playing God" for tens of
thousands of years, if "playing God" means doing things that other
animals can't do. Perhaps what is more startling about Venter's
synthetic cell is that it does away with the concept of the
soul.
The Vatican, strangely, has not yet addressed this aspect of it. It
seems the only hope for the soul is if it is argued that a
bacterial soul was created when the cell was booted up. I don't
think the Catholic Church would attempt that argument.
Venter's achievement is only a first step. A bacterium is about as
simple a life-form as you can get, and it will be much, much harder
to make more complex synthetic cells. Yet it is stunning proof of a
principle.
If a simple new, and self-replicating, life-form — with a computer
for a parent — can be created synthetically, there is no logical
reason why it can't be done for a more complex life-form.
The idea of vitalism and the soul — anyway long ignored by most
scientists, but which survives among theologians — is now
discredited, dead.
A century ago, the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson stated
that there was "elan vital," a "vital force," that
animated living things. You could never take inorganic things (such
as DNA molecules) and somehow imbue them with this vital force,
Bergson said.
Venter's remarkable breakthrough shows that Bergson was wrong.
One argument that could be made against this is that only humans
have souls. Apart from the fact that I don't like the conceit this
implies: that humans are created differently from all other species
— and apart from the fact that this is patently untrue, as
evolution by natural selection has shown us — the Vatican has
already defended the existence of souls in other life-forms.
Here's Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno, from his book
"Intelligent Life in the Universe," published by the Catholic Truth
Society in 2005. Consolmagno says: "If you're really eager to find
a reference to extraterrestrials in the Bible, you can't do better
than John 10: 14-16. 'I am the Good Shepherd . . . I have other
sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also . . .
so there will be one flock, one Shepherd.' "
If "you can't do better" than that, then Christianity can hardly be
seen as welcoming ET — "the other sheep that don't belong" — into
the fold.
In case it is too much of a leap for you to imagine that John meant
"aliens" when really he wrote "sheep," Consolmagno conveniently
spells it out: "Having a soul has nothing to do with how many arms
or legs or tentacles you have."
Of course, the Buddhist and Confucian concept of the soul is rather
different from the Christian one, so I was interested to see how
the Japanese media reacted, and the response from Japanese
scientists.
Thanks to the Science Media Center of Japan for providing these
translations: RIKEN's Genomics Science Center Director, Yoshihide
Hayashizaki, is quoted in the Nikkei Shimbun newspaper as saying,
"By using this technology we should be able to get explanations to
solve the mysteries of what minimum gene combinations and
mechanisms are needed to maintain life in living organisms."
In the same newspaper, bioethics professor Kazuto Kato, from Kyoto
University, came closest to addressing the societal issues: "As
well as debating about research regulations, it would be equally
important to think about what makes life life. We need to look
beyond the scientific definition, and discuss this issue as a whole
society."
And here's where Japanese readers come in. I've written before
about the attitude the Japanese have to technology — the love of
robots, especially, springs to mind. How did you feel when you
heard that artificial life had been created?