> That is the holy grail?
At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.
We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.
That is absolutely fucking wild.
Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
What a time to be alive.
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish
I don't think we are alone, but this is not logically sound. The conditions in the petri dish might be easily so special that their natural prevalence is < 1 per universe.
The first time this happens in a petri dish will likely have to be under extremely controlled circumstances. But the process will be modified and toyed with once it exists and I think that this will eventually lead to whole spectrum of (quasi?)biological systems that together cover a broad range of environmental conditions.
> Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
How does it affect religious ideas per se? its something many religious people long to find https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/disclosure-day-a...
You if believe creating life will end religion then you're wrong.
We thought evolutionary theory would do the same, now we got people who believe god directed evolution. Some believe everything evolved from a common ancestor except Humans.
So the believers will adapt to believe that Genesis was talking about exactly this.
Who thought evolutionary theory would end religion? Sounds like wishful thinking from people who were hoping for an end to religion.
Mainstream Christianity was not biblical literalist anyway. Read what Augustine or Origen had to say about interpreting Genesis.
> Who thought evolutionary theory would end religion?
Some terribly ill-informed people have. Plus ca change. Sadly, the experience of "Christianity" of many Americans is either caricature or some kind of novel and vulgar fundamentalism they grew up around that sprouted on American soil in the last century or two. Add to that the black legends supplied by the Enlightenment and others and you have a perfect storm of malicious ignorance.
Science can't disprove religion. Consider the "big bang", is that any less of a miracle than "God did it"? Science is like "just give us one miracle and we'll explain the rest".
The big bang theory isn't even incompatible with the idea that 'God did it'; the idea was first proposed by a Catholic priest, as a matter of fact! I think the anti-science stance of evangelicals has eclipsed in the modern consciousness the fact that modern science owes much to the Catholic church.
> This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest.
excerpt from https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosm...
> Science can't disprove religion.
That depends on which religion, doesn't it. The categorical claim doesn't make any sense, because the general notion of "religion" doesn't entail anything that is inherently at odds with science. And if there is a normative sense of what is or isn't religion, then this is even more true, because normativity means there is a correct religion or most correct religion, and you can't be correct without being true.
Some religious traditions, however, do make claims that are wide open to scientific discreditation (like the "Lamanite hypothesis" of Mormonism).
I think this is really the wrong framing. Science can't disprove religion. The question is whether it makes any sense to believe in the religion in the first place, given what observation and science say about the universe. Science can't prove that God didn't create the universe a nano-second ago in exactly the state to produce this temporal evolution, but no one believes that because its not explanatory and also fails a bunch of other, not-necessarily scientific, but rationally motivated epistemological tests.
The way I see this is that science cannot disprove any particular religion, but it can probably offer more compelling explanations for the state of the world than religion can offer. People haven't flocked away from religion because explanations for the state of the world aren't really what people want from religion. They want a sop for their anxieties. they want community, etc. I think believing in nonsense is a real shitty way to get these things, but I'm not most people.
(Disclaimer: on religion I try to be respectful, as an agnostic atheist) I do think our ability to “build tools that create life” is incredible, but to me has a limited argumentative impact on what I guess you could call the “prime mover” question: _But how did everything start?_ Does that seem reasonable or am I downplaying the implications you mentioned?
Nah. The natural pivot is from “we have never observed abiogenesis” to “see? Life required a creator.”
You can’t win
Thomas Aquinas made the argument that all life comes from other life in the 13th Century. I wouldn't classify it as a modern pivot so much as one of the central philosophical arguments for the existence of a Creator.
Aye, but this will let us gradually work towards more and more basic cell forms, so that we can eventually figure out abiogenesis.
I might in some sense agree with you but check your wording: creationism... we recreated life... see where I'm going?
Wait you think creating life disapproves creationism?
I’m no 7 day creationist but haha my guy…
Not really. AI isn't intelligent by any stretch. To make that claims requires ignorance of what constitutes "intelligence", especially the most essential element of intelligence, viz., intensionality. LLMs or expert system or whatever absolutely lack intensionality by definition because computation is by definition a purely syntactic process.
> Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place
I think you're way out of your depth here and making things up. The first tell is that you use "religion" as a blanket term as if all religious traditions make the same claims, which they absolutely do not. You can discredit, say, Mormonism much more easily than, say, Islam (though, ironically, there is a strange structural similarity between the two).
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life [..] so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
Who exactly claims that human beings or, generally, life on earth is the only life in the universe? None of the major religions do. I'm also going to assume that Christianity (or some caricature of it) is for you the paradigmatic reference point of what constitutes "religion", in which case there is nothing in Christian theology that excludes the possibility of life - even embodied intelligent life - elsewhere in the universe. (The latter is actually interesting from an ontological perspective. If the definition of "human" is "rational animal", then by definition, all rational animals are human. So, from an ontological perspective, even if an intelligent, phylogenetically distinct species were to be found on another planet, ontologically, they would also be human.)
That’s because we’re almost to the Technological Singularity
Kurzweil puts it between 2029-2032 and that seems right to me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity