Each year brings to light new scientific discoveries that have the power to either test our faith or strengthen it–most recently the news that scientists have created artificial life forms in the laboratory. If humans can create life, what does that mean for the creation story found in Scripture?

Biochemist and Christian apologist Fazale Rana, for one, isn’t worried. In Creating Life in the Lab, he details the fascinating quest for synthetic life and argues convincingly that when scientists succeed in creating life in the lab, they will unwittingly undermine the evolutionary explanation for the origin of life, demonstrating instead that undirected chemical processes cannot produce a living entity.