A brilliant scientist creates life

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To the original poster:

No it is not reasonable, but on the other hand the scientists creation is his -property- and he can treat it as he pleases. Laws pertaining to the protection of rights and forbidding cruelty to sentient beings only apply to natural sentient beings, not manufactured sentient beings.

If this hypothetical scientist killed his creature would he by guilty of murder? Under current law, no. Man made artificial sentient beings are not persons under current law. They have no rights (does a car built by you from the ground up have rights? Or a computer?).

Being unreasonable is not necessarily in breach of the law.

ruveyn

I think that the newly created life form probably would refuse to believe they even had such a creator. I imagine they would believe instead that all life in their little laboratory spontaneously evolved from a primordial soup billions of years ago after a big bang.

Hyperthetical concepts topic

I was thinking along the lines that creators of life have this need to feel superior, as in it is just too tempting not to put a stumbling block before the blind. This may well be the reason for the creation by humans of the concept of an invisible creator, that is, worship something invisible in order to somehow deny that the notion that humans are superior when they create something. This may have been meant as a sort of compromise. If you have to have a religion, base it on an abstract concept creating us, to avoid the infinite regress that ruevyn suggests. "Let us get the notion of creation out of the way, then we can concentrate on more realistic here-and-now issues that are more important, and that no human is superior to any other."

Your comparing a scientist to God? God does not demand people to worship him, it is for the benefits of the humans not God himself. This analogy doesnt work too well.

Interestingly, by spending time on the internet, I've discovered a new law of human psychology: If someone wants to criticize a belief on grounds that it is intellectually flimsy, the fallacy of choice is the strawman.

^Fnord, I'm not following you.

Back to Tallysman's original question, I doubt he indeed created life. Prove it to my amoebian mind!! !

The closest incidence was through the Miller Urey Experiment, in which inorganic materials were transformed into amino acids (thus organic compounds). No true life was created but the building blocks were formed through this experiment that simulated the conditions of early Earth.

One of the basic attributes accredited to life is the ability to reproduce. An intelligent robot may have many or nearly all the qualities of an organic human but being a mechanical construct it has no ability to reproduce unless it is given the technical instruction to duplicate itself. Is this technical instruction the point of life creation?

The old Testament on the story of Adam and Eve speaks unspecifically of the knowledge conferred by the apple forbidden by God but the subsequent actions clearly indicate it involves the knowledge of sex and reproduction as it concerns nakedness and physical attraction. So it seems, in legend, that God was angry that mankind attained the godlike ability to produce new humans independent of God. The concern with sex which is a prime consideration of Christianity leaves no doubt that reproduction is somehow a thorn in the side of that religion and the concept of creating life independent of God is something of a horror to devout Christians. Nevertheless understanding the basics of DNA and RNA leads inevitably to a culmination in self reproduction although intelligent and aware life is an altogether different matter.