“Artificial Life”---No Problem for Thomists

A lot of atheists have been exuding a lot of glee about the alleged creation of artificial life. Surely this finally beats the hated theism to death, doesn’t it? How can they maintain that God was necessary to create life when man has just done so all by himself?

First of all, whether this is really “creating life” is a bit dubious, though it’s certainly an immense scientific achievement. As Mark Shea just pointed out, “The [u]niverse [j]ust [c]hanged and [n]obody [n]oticed.” But to cut through all the hype, what’s really been done here is that the researchers artificially copied an already existing, natural genome; took the genome out of a different species of cell; and put their artificial copy into that other cell. The cell species literally became the genome species once this was done. That’s fascinating and amazing, but I’m not really sure where life was created in the process.

But for this discussion, let’s just assume that life was created, whole-cloth, by these researchers, by which I mean that they took dead material and worked their science on it and it became alive by some process not active in nature. What of it? Why should this dampen our faith in a creator God? Thomists, the most consistent school of those who believe in such a God, have no problem with this possibility because they understand the concept of substance.

Substance is a word coming from the Latin substare, which means “to stand under”. Life forms, in particular, all have a substance. The substance is not material; it’s not something that you can cut out of a creature. Essentially, the reasoning is as follows:

All things change. But these things change while still remaining the same thing. For example, my body has no cells now that it had when it was in its infancy. Yet no one would deny that my body is still the same thing that it was back then. It’s changed, certainly, but it hasn’t changed what it is. We recognize it as being the same thing. It has the same identity. One could quite reasonably point at my infant body and call it me, while also pointing at my current body and calling it me; indeed, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. This is because the two are the same thing. It’s not just a linguistic convention; they are really the same thing, and our linguistic conventions simply reflect that.

Yet no material part of them is the same. I can’t take a chunk of each one, point to it, and say, “This is the same matter in both bodies.” There is no such piece of material. Therefore, there is something underlying the matter, something “standing under” it, which makes it the same thing. That something we call the substance or, sometimes, form.

Materialists scoff at this. They will argue that when we refer to these two things as the same, we’re just making reality easier for us to think about; in reality, they are different things precisely because their physical matter is different. But there is no reason to believe that matter is the sole component of existence, and substantial reason to believe otherwise, though that reasoning is beyond the scope of this little article. In any case, we are arguing why a theist, arguing from a theist’s first principles, won’t be bothered by this particular scientific feat, not why a materialist from his first principles isn’t. So for now, we will leave it at this and proceed.

That “substance,” in man, is called simply the soul, specifically the rational soul. In man, it is spiritual; that is, independent from matter. We know that it is spiritual because it has spiritual powers, specifically the power of reason. But nobody’s talked here about creating a man, only some form of life. So what about the substance of some species of protist?

That substance is also called the soul; however, it is not a spiritual soul. We know that it’s not because the protist has no powers which are indicative of spirituality. It’s incapable of reason, most specifically, and its actions are entirely governed by its matter (as this experiment tends to prove). Rather, its soul is simply its substance; it’s what makes this creature what it is, rather than something else. To avoid confusion, I won’t use the word “soul” for it anymore, and simply call it the creature’s substance or form. But the principle is the same; the form is what makes it this particular type of thing, rather than something else.

So what gives rise to the form? In man, who has a spiritual form, God directly creates the soul. But in lesser animals, plants, bacteria, and protists, God does not directly create the soul. It is not necessary for Him to do so; the soul is dependent upon the matter. When a man dies, his soul leaves his body, it doesn’t cease to exist; that’s because it’s spiritual and is totally independent of the matter (the body) which it’s informing. When a protist dies, on the other hand, its form simply stops; it no longer exists at all. What we have is no longer a protist, but simply the bits of matter that used to be a protist. The protist is, truly and simply, dead. The form of the protist is dependent upon having suitable matter which it can inform; if the matter is not suitable, for whatever reason, the form cannot exist in it, and therefore doesn’t.

Similarly, when the matter is suitable for the form to exist, the form does exist. Thomists say that the form arises from the potency of the matter; that is, when matter of the proper type is so arranged as to be the proper sort for a form, that form arises. Thus, when a cell undergoes mitosis (when it splits), the new cell that splits off from the old one has its matter appropriately arranged for the form of that same species. That form then arises, and there are now two protists of that species present. In the same way, when an animal (say, a dog) conceives, the seed of the male (scientifically, the sperm) and the egg of the female come together and become matter which is suitable for an embryonic dog. The form of the dog then arises. From that moment, until the moment the dog dies, the same form is informing that matter, even if the matter is completely recycled several times over (as science tells us that it is). Then, when the dog dies, it dies precisely because some part of its matter has decayed so seriously, whether from injury, sickness, or simply overuse (which we call “old age”), that the matter is no longer suitable for the form of a dog. That dog then dies, and the form ceases to exist.

But isn’t this non-falsifiable? Scientists pride themselves on proposing theories that are falsifiable; that is, that can be proven or disproven by empirical experiments. This means that a theory can be tested and confirmed or disproven by others. In that sense, no, this explanation of reality is not non-falsifiable; it could be proven wrong in a number of ways. One who disagrees with it could show that it’s internally inconsistent; that it doesn’t match observed evidence; that it doesn’t properly answer objections made against it by other schools of thought. Materialists, on the other hand, often object to it with statements that are non-falsifiable, such as “the soul doesn’t exist” or “matter is the only thing that exists.” Really? Prove it, by scientific experiments. The fact is that all they can prove is that non-material things can’t be measured, which is something we already knew. Again, first principles are beyond the scope of this article, but it’s clear that this philosophical explanation of life is at the very least just as valid as any other.

So what’s happened in this experiment? All that’s happened is that the scientists have jiggled with the matter of one bacteria such that it’s no longer suitable for its original species—an easy thing to do, which we typically call “killing”—but is suitable for another species (a much more difficult matter only now accomplished). They did this by transplanting the DNA, which our science makes clear is the single most important material component of a thing, of one species into the cell of a different species after removing that species’s own DNA. A fantastic feat, to be sure. But nothing that should give any theist pause.

Whether doing this sort of thing is a good idea is, of course, a different question. But it doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination disprove the existence of a creator God, Who created all things and keeps them in existence. When scientists have created a living bacterium from scratch, where previously nothing, not even nonliving matter, had existed, then theists will have to worry. But given that creation ex nihilo is impossible for anyone other than God, I’m not holding my breath in concern.

Praise be to Christ the King!