…. when they talked about the magic of clay soup, shaken and stirred liberally, resulting in the creation of life.

But is the laugh on me?  “Scientists expect to create life in next 10 years,” says MSNBC.com.

Well, never say never.  A little heresy can be a good thing.  We’ll see.

Religion among the overeducated grows and grows. We’ve already talked about the Church of Global Warming; it is the high fundamentalism of the true unreality-based community. And there is more: As long as you don’t call it religion, they’ll believe any version of the Hand of God coming out of the heavens to shake and bake Creation — so long as it’s not called Creationism:

Recent probes inside comets show it is overwhelmingly likely that life began in space, according to a new paper by Cardiff University scientists….

The Cardiff team suggests that radioactive elements can keep water in liquid form in comet interiors for millions of years, making them potentially ideal “incubators” for early life. They also point out that the billions of comets in our solar system and across the galaxy contain far more clay than the early Earth did. The researchers calculate the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet at one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.

Professor Wickramasinghe said: “The findings of the comet missions, which surprised many, strengthen the argument for panspermia. We now have a mechanism for how it could have happened.”

(Via Insty.) Now we can sleep at night! We can admit the preposterousness of the suggestion that life spontaneously began and then, after a few tough winters, turned into Albert Einstein, Merv Griffin and Alex Rodriguez on this lonely sphere, because we have an alternative “scientific” explanation: It “could have happened,” see, that life came to earth on magic flying incubator rocks, which are uh-infinity old.

How do “radioactive elements … keep[ing] water in liquid form in comet interiors for millions of years… mak[es] them potentially ideal ‘incubators’ for early life.” (“Potentially”?)

One theory for the origins of life proposes that clay particles acted as a catalyst, converting simple organic molecules into more complex structures.

I am not a good enough clay physicist to tackle that one. In all seriousness, it is fascinating. But, in reality, it really answers nothing, both literally and philosophically. How anyone could live in this world and experience it, and any of the people in it, and believe they are merely bouncing molecules happily pounding out civilization, beauty and love — much less suggest the sophomoric, doper-type fantasy that Creation is really some dude’s computer game — is, to me, an assertion of faith over reason and intellect; a muting of the music of nature and the soul that is about as depressing as you can get.