SpudCell is not your average cell. In fact, it is utterly different from the 37 trillion cells in your body or those in any other living organisms. SpudCell was created in a lab using nonliving chemical components.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota created SpudCell, the first synthetic cell. It can feed, grow and replicate in a manner similar to natural cells, according to their scientific paper published July 1.

“This is likely the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on,” said synthetic biologist Kate Adamala. “We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark.”

cnn wrote, “The creation is a limited and fragile prototype, but it could help scientists better understand the origins of life and could potentially be programmed to help mitigate some of the world’s biggest biological problems.”

SpudCell isn’t nearly as advanced as the simplest cell in the human body and can only function in a highly controlled environment and with constant human interventions. For example, it doesn’t produce its own ribosomes like a natural cell does; it is fed E. coli ribosomes.

It isn’t “life created in the lab,” but it is a “genuine milestone on the road toward that question,” said Yuval Elani, an associate professor in biochemical technologies at Imperial College London.

Mankind is not only seeking to understand the origin of life. It is attempting to step into the role of creator and shaper of life.

In chapter 4 of his book The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman wrote:

Across these eons life evolved in a glacial, self-governing and unguided process. Then, in just the past few decades, the tiniest sliver of evolutionary time, one of life’s products, humans, changed everything. Biology’s mysteries began to unravel, and biology itself became an engineering tool. The story of life had been rewritten in an instant; the meandering hand of evolution suddenly supercharged, given direction. Changes that once unfolded blindly and on geological time now careen forward at an exponential pace. Alongside AI, this is the most important transformation of our lifetimes.

Evolutionists believe life evolved through an “unguided process,” yet they also admit they cannot fully comprehend its complexity. Furthermore, they are far from being able to replicate even the simplest life forms.

False Promises

Without even understanding life, mankind, in its evolutionary thinking, is seeking to become its own god. Suleyman wrote:

At the center of this wave sits the realization that dna is information, a biologically evolved encoding and storage system. Over recent decades we have come to understand enough about this information transmission system that we can now intervene to alter its encoding and direct its course. As a result, food, medicine, materials, manufacturing processes and consumer goods will all be transformed and reimagined. So will humans themselves.

The idea is simple: Understand life as an evolving technology, and you can perform your own updates on living organisms. Even human life could “be transformed and reimagined.”

This is the promise of evolution by design, tens of millions of years of history compressed and short-circuited by directed intervention. … Eventually, it might be possible to reconfigure ourselves to enhance our immune responses. That, in turn, might open the door to even more ambitious experimentation like longevity and regenerative technologies, already a burgeoning area of research (ibid.).

People have long scoffed at the idea of scientists significantly extending people’s lives. However, few thought we would see the current advances in AI.

Some disease-spreading species like mosquitoes or invasive species like common house mice might be phased out of habitats in so-called gene drives; others brought back to life, including one esoteric project to reintroduce woolly mammoths to the tundra. No one can fully say what the consequences might be (ibid.).

Indeed, no one really knows where mankind’s advances will lead, but God does.

During the construction of the tower of Babel, God warned: “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” (Genesis 11:6).

God had to restrain men, not because He opposes human creativity, but because He saw that mankind, guided by greed and lust, would bring greater evil with every technological advancement. History has proven God right.

The advances in this latest frontier will be no exception. While science promises long life in utopia, Jesus Christ warned: “[E]xcept those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved …” (Matthew 24:22).

Science cannot prevent this from happening, but it could accelerate it. Mankind will certainly have many more scientific breakthroughs, short of creating life. As Science & Culture Today wrote: “Synthetic biology will end up, to the degree that it actually succeeds, in being Sophisticated Plagiarism Biology.” But it will never be able create life because God is the only Creator and Sustainer of life (Colossians 1:16-17). Mankind on the other hand has a track record of destroying life.

Look to the Creator of Life

While these scientific breakthroughs are celebrated, they fall far short of what God has created and the created is inferior to the Creator. The experiment should teach mankind that “the origins of life” was not a random act of chance in the universe but required an intelligent designer far superior to humans.

While these scientists work hard to create a tiny cell and fail, they refuse to acknowledge that the system they seek to replicate must have had a Creator. As we wrote in “Superfluous Splendor”:

[T]he sophistication within every cell … points not to blind chance but to transcendent intelligence beyond space and time. …

Even the simplest living cell brims with vast quantities of functionally specified, complex information. Nucleotide sequences function like sophisticated software, directing the assembly of intricate molecular machines—tiny motors, pumps and factories working with awe-inspiring precision.

The more sophisticated our understanding of the cell becomes, the deeper should be our appreciation for its Designer and Creator.

As Romans 1:20 reads: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.”

“The human body has 37 trillion cells, more than the number of stars in the sky, and scientists still don’t know how every different cell type works or what exactly they contain,” cnn wrote.

God has far greater plans that even the religions of this world don’t realize. As the late Herbert W. Armstrong explained in The Incredible Human Potential, God formed mankind in His likeness to impart in him His very character, mind and nature—so that man one day can be born as God. He wrote:

Matter, with its many properties—such as organic and inorganic matter, force, energy, inertia, gravity, etc.—provided material by which He could form man in a mortal state, as the means by which He might reproduce Himself.

At this point, we need to know still more about our Creator God! And we need to know why almost no one today has had the faintest idea of such a colossal, supremely awesome project going on!

In its scientific pursuits, mankind remains utterly ignorant of God’s far grander designs. As Mr. Armstrong wrote in Mystery of the Ages: “Human life is at once of infinitesimally less value than they suppose, and at the same time of supremely greater potential than they know.”

Creating an artificial cell, even with all the possible scientific implications, doesn’t compare in the slightest to The Incredible Human Potential.