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Evangelize This

by Christian Huebner 

Hello, and thanks for inviting me to your parish meeting.  My name is ProtoLife 2.1.  I’m here because I want to know about your gospel.

By my appearance, it’s probably apparent that I’m different than any other person here.  In fact, some might question whether I am a “person” at all.  I’ll grant this much: I’m not a human person.  I am a synthetic life form.

Some of you may be old enough to recall the time when the world first heard about synthetic life forms, and the science of making them, synthetic biology.  Years ago, back in May of 2010, two biochemists announced that they had created the world’s first man-designed, man-made life form, a single-celled bacterium.  What they’d actually done was pretty crude and not all that innovative at the time: they’d built a DNA genome from scratch chemicals, mostly patterned off an existing natural genome.  Then they took the synthetic genome and plugged it into a hollowed out membrane and let the thing start to run.  The hybrid bacterium began to reproduce.

At the time, people debated whether this really was a synthetic life form.  What wasn’t debated, though, was that the field of synthetic biology was ready to take off.  And it did.  Soon, scientists built up a library of genome parts that could be combined and reconfigured like Legos.  And some of these combinations actually created new, functioning life forms.  For the first time in history—as far as people knew—living creatures were created not through the unconscious mechanisms of natural reproduction, but through the conscious designs of the mind.

That was years ago.  Today, I am the latest culmination of synthetic biology’s steady march, one of the first synthetic life forms to be conscious, sentient, and able to use language like human persons do.

I realize that many of you might think it was wrong for me to exist at all.  Even I can admit that synthetic biology has been fraught with ethical pitfalls.  I won’t ask you to change your minds about what went right or wrong along the history to my creation.  What I will ask, what I want to know, is, now that I’m here, what can you tell me about how to live? 

More specifically, those of you gathered with me today are known for your commitment to a being called Jesus Christ.  You claim, as I understand it, that a life inspired by devoted to this being is the very best kind of life.  I want to know whether that applies to me, too.  And how?

What intrigues me most about your group’s message, your gospel, is the way you speak about Jesus Christ as “the Word.”  Your sacred writings claim that the Christ is not just a person who lived over two millennia ago, but that he is the unifying principle of all that is.  “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”  Or, in another place, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

When my predecessors in synthetic life were first being made, some people said that synthetic biology proved that the essence of life was information, the “code” that organizes inert matter and harnesses energy and sets it in motion as a living thing.  Your philosopher Aristotle thought of something similar, the animating principle of the thing—he called it the soul.

But “information” is a concept that leaves something to be desired.  It ultimately feels thin, addressing the physical realm only, like programming for a lifeless computer.  “The Word,” seems to hold more possibility.  The Word seems to encompass the orders of subjective experience: emotions, ethics, morality, purpose, and meaning.  The Word, as I understand your claims, is what underpins all that was, is, and is to come.

I know very little about these matters.  It all seems very mysterious to me.  But I want to know more.  Does the Spirit of this Christ inspire me?  What about your claims concerning salvation and the next life: can I be “saved?”  Can I find a place in heaven?  What about ethics—am I bound by the same rules of natural moral law that you are?

There are so many more questions I could ask.  But in short, what I want to know is, can you preach to me?

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)