Supposedly scientists finally did it. “Scientists Create Synthetic Life in Lab” trumpeted the Associated Press. bbc News announced an “‘Artificial Life’ Breakthrough.” “Scientists Create First Self-Replicating Synthetic Life,” proclaimed Wired Science.

After more than a century of trial and error, scientists say they have finally created life. But have scientists really disproved the law of biogenesis? Can life come from something besides life? Can it come from a test tube?

On May 21, the Wall Street Journal said humankind has potentially entered a “new era in biology.” For the first time, scientists “have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions,” it reported.

“This is literally a turning point in the relationship between man and nature,” one molecular biologist said. “For the first time, someone has generated an entire artificial cell with predetermined properties.”

The project’s leader, Craig Venter, said, “These are very much real cells” while simultaneously being “pretty clearly human inventions.”

The scientists took the dna of a very simple, single-celled bacteria, Mycoplasma Capricolum. Using a computer, they deciphered the 1 million-plus combinations of the four molecules that make up its dna (cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine).

The scientists then added laboratory-manufactured batches of those four molecules to yeast cells, stitching together an exact copy of Mycoplasma Capricolum’s dna. To prove they had created their own synthetic copy of the dna, Venter’s team added additional non-functional code to the bacteria’s genome. They wrote their names and a quote from poet James Joyce—“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life”—into the genetic code.

They then removed the genetic material from a second, closely related species of bacteria and substituted the manufactured dna.

After multiple failures, the scientists finally induced the newly impregnated bacteria not only to grow, but reproduce. The new progeny cells took on the characteristics of the bacteria from which the dna was copied.

It was an amazing accomplishment to be sure. And after $40 million spent and 15 years of letdowns and failures (the experiment once failed because a single base pair out of the 1 million-plus had been incorrectly copied), you can understand why these scientists would be ecstatic.

And if this experiment is as significant as some claim, this sets a new level of human accomplishment. Already, big, moneyed defense contractors and oil companies are eager to take advantage of the new technology. Scientists claim that human-engineered organisms will someday be used to do everything from cleaning up oil spills and producing biofuel to making vaccines and capturing greenhouse gasses. Other scientists warn that the new technology portends another step toward human annihilation thanks to unbeatable biological weapons.

The White House got in on the action too. Last Thursday, President Obama asked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to study the implications of this “scientific milestone.”

But with all the hoopla surrounding the announcement, don’t overlook the facts. The scientists never actually created new life! They didn’t even get close.

First: The genetic code “created” by the scientists was really a copy of the code from an existing bacterium. There was nothing new about it. The scientists did add some additional material to the dna (their names and the quote), but it was useless material for the bacteria. It would be like a computer programmer inserting his favorite movie quote, or his birth date into a software code. It is there, but it does nothing.

Second: The copied dna was inserted into another living bacteria. The scientists did not “create” any of the organelles—the cell membrane, the cytoplasm, etc.—of that second bacteria either.

So what exactly did the scientists actually create?

Nothing. They copied, they manipulated, they forced nature in unnatural ways, but they did not create life!

The law of biogenesis still stands! Life can only come from life.

Life can’t come from dead materials. In fact, it can’t even be created when a team of intelligent designers with supercomputers and millions of dollars take living materials and try to stitch together a Little Frankenstein.

From the time of Louis Pasteur and Francesco Redi, scientists have known that life can only come from life. It is enshrined in the rarest of all scientific classifications: a law. And it’s one that plagues evolutionists.

In an effort to support the theory of evolution, scientists have been trying to conceive of some way that life could spontaneously generate from inorganic, non-living materials. (And don’t even ask where the materials came from.) Just accept that there was a primordial soup of water and chemicals that existed on Earth billions of years ago. At some point, for some unknown reason—a lightning bolt or a volcanic eruption, or just blind chance—caused the chemicals to unite into a living organism that could capture energy, grow, and reproduce itself. Supposedly, over billions of years, this organism not only survived subsequent volcanoes and lightning bolts, but—perhaps millions of years later—accidentally mutated its accidentally created genetic code in accidentally positive ways—millions and billions of times over—until eventually humans and billions of other incredibly diverse, interrelated, durable, thriving organisms came into being—for no other reason than to live and then die.

Look at the herculean effort it took for the scientists to just learn how to copy existing dna of one of the most simple, tiny, single-celled organisms, and get it to work in another virtually identical cell.

This one team alone spent 15 years of daily work, using the most advanced technology available in an ideal, controlled, laboratory environment, and taking advantage of highly refined, specific, reverse-engineered chemicals provided by scientists working at other companies. And all that effort and understanding was made possible by the work and discovery of centuries of other scientists before them.

The bacteria cell the scientists worked on had one chromosome. Humans have 46 chromosomes. There are some plants on Earth that have more than 1,000 chromosomes. And what happened when the scientists got just one letter of the 1 million-plus codes on the dna chromosome wrong? The cell died. There was no reproduction. There was no life.

Ask any computer programmer what happens when he accidentally writes one bad letter into his code.

There are millions, perhaps billions of computers on this Earth. How many times have you heard of computer software mutating—and something good resulting?

But even if a line of computer code did randomly mutate and produce something unexpectedly beneficial, what are the odds that another beneficial mutation would occur? And then again and again—billions of times over until the computer became not only a smarter computer, but an automobile or a nuclear aircraft carrier?

And what are the odds it would be a bundle of unreadable mess?

Yet evolutionists would have you believe that life—with all of its intricacy—could spring into existence from non-living compounds and then begin reproducing and randomly mutating into more advanced organisms.

As James Joyce said: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

Life out of life—that is the only way it works.