Michael Jensen, man-made genetic instructions, and what have you got to lose ...

Dearie me, the theologians at Moore Park college are all in a dither, or is that a tizz, or is that a tither?

The good Dr. Michael Jensen, sprung or stimulated by the shocking news that humans are seeking to play god, comes forth with abundant riches of reassurance for any doubting Thomas's in our midst.

Playing God? Not just yet, he scribbles, cheerful that humans - despite the efforts of Craig Venter and his team - are still away off from doing a Frankenstein and shouting "It's alive, it's alive".

Quoting the book of Genesis, the Financial Times trumpeted "Let there be life!" — as if we had just witnessed a re-run of the dawn of time.

Steady on, Murdochian secular heretics, you've failed to consider the deeper theological implications:

It's incredible — but genesis it ain't. Human beings are still just improvising on the tunes they find embedded in the natural world. It's as if you took one of Shakespeare's plays and chopped up every word — jumbled all the words up and then placed them all back in the correct sequence or a very similar sequence with a slightly different order. Would you then consider yourself on a par with Shakespeare?

Well maybe William Burroughs, with his cut up technique, would. But let's not go post-modernist and talk of assemblage and all those other aesthetic techniques that just confuse the picture and muddy the waters.

It would seem quite clear that god is Shakespeare, or perhaps Shakespeare is god, or perhaps - and this seems a viable third alternative - Shakespeare has bugger all to do with the matter to hand.

Jensen quotes the Scientific American story on how Drew Endy doesn't think of it as creation or genesis, but he misses a dandier quote:

"This is the first self-replicating cell on the planet to have a computer for a parent," said J. Craig Venter during a press briefing on May 20. "It's also the first species to have a Web site in its genetic code." (Man-Made Genetic Instructions Yield Living Cells for the First Time).

Go computers.

And then this even dandier one, which suggests that scientists have a better understanding of literature and life than our resident theologian:

The man-made genetic code also includes three quotes: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life" from James Joyce; "see things not as they are but as they might be" from Robert Oppenheimer via the Ethical Culture School in New York City; and "what I cannot build, I cannot understand" from physicist Richard Feynmann.

Oh yes, take that Shakespeare.

But you can see why Jensen is a little unnerved. Every time science cuts god off at the pass, or dry gulches her, or digs up another can of worms, or breaches the earth wall of belief, theologians have to get busy and patch up the damage.

First the explanation for thunder and lightning got taken away, then some of the fruitier aspects of the old testament took a pounding, then some began to doubt that Brendan Fraser - or before him Pat Boone and James Mason - might find hell somewhere in the interior of the earth, down below the gold mines, then others looked to the stars and wondered where they might find heaven - apart from a metaphysical one, filled with vapourous clouds and Hollywood CGIs.

Sad to say, it looks at the moment as if heaven isn't somewhere near Betelguese, or even to be found in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice.

It's desperate times for the theologians, but at least the Moore College kind don't have to explain how transubstantiation makes any mystical sense at all. They've given that game away, as they keep giving lots of other areas away, but but does this mean that theologians have to scribble mystical nonsense as the final out?

Jensen manages to come up with a doozy for a capper:

As creatures made in the image of God, however, we have a standing invitation to share in God's creative activity – to "play God", if you will.

Yeaay, we've been invited on to the creation team. We can play god at will. It's like crayons or plasticine or lego. Or even dabbling in the mud or the primeval swamp.

This astounding advance is just the kind of thing Christian theology teaches us to expect from human beings. We create in imitation of God's creative work.

Clever Christian theology. But it seems somehow rather limited, as an astounding advance, if it's created in imitation of the creative work shown by god. You know, it's not like the way She used to talk through those angels to all those middle eastern types, back when they weren't so suspicious and threatening to western civilisation.

Because you see all god does is allow us to imitate, to colour in the shapes in the colouring in book, to do a kind of rough sketch of god's creative work. Gee, and all that talk about originality and creativity, and it turns out it's just a form of imitation, perhaps even simple penis envy.

Where are those angels now, the advanced thinkers and creative doodlers and interferers? Excluding American television of course, and the odd noir comic. Never mind, on we trudge:

Being the product of the kind of beings we are, we can certainly see the potential in it for great harm as well as extraordinary good.

Stay for a moment, roll your tongue around on that one, like a rich luscious red. Being the product of the kind of beings we are ...

Oh indeed, so it's no wonder as products of beings, that we can see the potential for great harm in god. The silly goose. Came up with his/her imperfect invention of the world and humanity, and then decided to rest on the seventh day. Before disappearing and leaving it up to us for a couple of thousand years.

But Venter and his friends have sounded a remarkably clear echo of the divine work itself.

Oh indeed. I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Now that's divine work at its best.

But sadly Jensen didn't have many buyers, and the comments section is rich in repartee:

I just snorted my coffee out my nose after reading that last paragraph. I expected some gibberish but not the full scale immersion in la-la land.

I wonder where he ranks AIDS and Ebola on the list of god's creations?

And so on and so forth. Well of course we would expect that from a coffee drinker, most likely of the latte-swilling, inner western kind. We're maintaining our rage here at the pond at these beastly, ghastly drug addicts and their snorting of kahve.

Still it's always jolly good fun when the theologians get out and about and meet their public, and you can meet Michael Jensen here at his blog, The Blogging Parson.

That said, if you want to make actual sense of Ventner's work - you know in a logical scientific and coherent way - why not toddle off to the Scientific American story.

Where's the harm? What have you got to lose, apart from a few superstitions of a minor kind?Like Christianity, or Islam ...

(Below: a gentleman's heaven, as featured in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life? Sheesh, can't god do real breasts, and what about the virgins?)