Creating Life in the Lab

How New Discoveries in Synthetic Biology Make a Case for the Creator

by: Fazale Rana

• Format

  E-Book

  ISBN

  9781441214584

  Pub. Date

  Feb 2011

  SRP

  $17.99

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About

Each year brings to light new scientific discoveries that have the power to either test our faith or strengthen it--most recently the news that scientists have created artificial life forms in the laboratory. If humans can create life, what does that mean for the creation story found in Scripture?

Biochemist and Christian apologist Fazale Rana, for one, isn't worried. In Creating Life in the Lab, he details the fascinating quest for synthetic life and argues convincingly that when scientists succeed in creating life in the lab, they will unwittingly undermine the evolutionary explanation for the origin of life, demonstrating instead that undirected chemical processes cannot produce a living entity.

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Endorsements

"I tell my students that if scientists could produce life from completely nonliving materials, they would illustrate that such a feat requires lots of intelligent planning! In the spirit of Rana's earlier work (The Cell's Design), his Creating Life in the Lab beautifully details how intelligent divine planning--rather than unguided naturalistic processes--best explains the emergence of first life."--Paul Copan, professor and Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics, Palm Beach Atlantic University; author of Is God a Moral Monster?

"I recommend Rana's book as an excellent resource for understanding in detail current developments in synthetic biology and origin-of-life research. It shows how these developments point toward rather than away from God the Creator."--Vern S. Poythress, professor of New Testament interpretation, Westminster Theological Seminary

"We are privileged to live in a time of unprecedented and accelerating scientific insights into the nature of the microcosm and the macrocosm. Significantly, this process has produced a growing wealth of evidences that require an intelligent agency as the inference to the best explanation. As Fazale Rana puts it in his significant new contribution to the growing literature on synthetic biology, to generate, sustain, and manipulate a living entity requires the intense involvement of highly intelligent beings. Rana's trenchant analysis of the characteristics of life, the conditions necessary for biogenesis, the information-rich biomacromolecules, and the attempts to synthesize artificial life is achieved with clarity and scientific rigor."--Kenneth Boa, President, Reflections Ministries, Atlanta

"Philosophical naturalists claim that 'creation of life in the lab' is proof that purely purposeless Darwinian processes can account for living organisms. With precision and charm, Fuz Rana demonstrates that nothing could be further from the truth. Like it or not, a brave new world replete with synthetic biology is now upon us. Rana's book will equip lovers of the truth to think Christianly in defense of that which corresponds to reality."--Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast

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