Physicist Cees Decker receives $40 million for groundbreaking research: ‘I’m playing God’

Scientists have discovered all kinds of things about Earth’s history, Decker says, but they haven’t yet discovered how life originated. “We know what the building blocks are, but how they develop into something living, from molecule to cell, is really a mystery.” Decker and his team want to use these basic elements to create a living cell in the laboratory. “A molecule is not alive, but many molecules together can form a living cell. We want to investigate that.”

Is God’s existence exposed?

Many religious people see the hand of God as the origin of life. However, if life could have been created in a laboratory, wouldn’t that categorically deny the existence of God? Decker, known as a prominent Christian scientist, doesn’t think so: “God is the Almighty who is in control of everything. He is behind the big bang, behind life, behind evolution. He does it in ways I don’t know.” “I don’t understand with my simple scientific methods.”

In any case, he criticizes this way of believing: “You should not base your faith on a gap in knowledge. Then you say: ‘You can explain a lot, but fortunately it is not yet how life arose, we still have God there.’” I truly believe that it is It’s a shame to look at God that way.”

But doesn’t the Bible say that God created the earth in six days? Yes, but the text is not meant to be taken literally, Decker says. He says: “The story has a lot of expression, but it is not a scientific text.” Theologian Stefan Bass, a regular guest on the Unknownable Podcast, earned his doctorate on these texts. According to him, reading the creation story literally is a relatively recent phenomenon: “The ancient Church Fathers did not read it that way at all.”