Making Life

(I am having that occasional problem with downloading an image.)

"The Snows of Ganymede."

Angel Garson must know of artificial life but pretends not to:

"'Y' mean y'all can make life!'" (VI, p. 182)

An Engineer explains that it is just a matter of reproducing the conditions that generated life on Earth. Another local mutters that it sounds blasphemous, adding:

"'Only God -'" (ibid.)

In my teens, I read sf and became used to the idea that human beings, "androids," might be grown from inorganic materials in laboratories. Androids contrasted with mechanical robots. When I suggested the possibility of artificial human life to a school friend, he stood up and shouted, "GOD WOULDN'T ALLOW IT!" My mother responded that human beings are holy whereas a "thing" from a laboratory couldn't be holy. I felt that sf was a good eye-opener and educator.

Peter Cushing who acted the part of Frankenstein, as well as of Sherlock Holmes and others, said, of creating life, "Well, only one person can do that." Probably, "person" should be capitalized, thus "Person." But Cushing said that reverently, not doctrinairely, like my acquaintances.

In Robert Heinlein's juvenile novel, Starman Jones, the title character met an alien monkey-like animal with a very limited vocabulary. This made me suggest to a Marist Brother that, if monkeys were slight more intelligent, then we would be able to converse with them. The Brother replied that, if monkeys had souls, then we would be able to converse with them. This took the discussion out of sf into religious doctrine. I did not appreciate that sudden switch. It was like looking at pictures of cavemen, then of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Which was right?

Horatio captures our sense of living between faith and secularism:

"So have I heard and do in part believe it."

-Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1.