Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Project Aims At Genetically Engineered God
SF artist tries to find Almighty on tree of life beside bacteria, slime mold
Researchers in San Francisco have announced that they are on the verge of genetically engineering God.
Hailing the effort as a “major simultaneous breakthrough in the fields of science and religion,” the International Association for Divine Taxonomy (IADT) has “developed a novel method of genetic engineering that may soon allow scientists to place God on the tree of life alongside every other species, including slime molds, fungi and humans.”
The goal is “accurate placement ... of all deities worldwide, including the god commonly known as Yahweh, Jehovah and/or Allah,”—or, for scientific purposes, Divineus deus—in order to end centuries of often violent conflict between faith and reason.
No, this isn’t something out of an article from The Onion. It’s the latest “thought experiment” by San Francisco art critic and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, 33, whose recent projects include selling shares of the 6 billion neurons in his brain ("Brain Trust,” 2003) and trying to convince the Berkeley City Council to pass an unbreakable law, Aristotle’s A=A (Every Entity Is Equal to Itself, 2002).