Ironically we have religious fanatics on one hand... and now "scientists" trying to play god on the other.
Extremists either way you slice it.
Religious people have been accusing others of "playing god" for thousands of years. As near as I can tell, the definition of "playing god" means "trying to understand parts of the physical world that I personally do not understand but think should be blocked off from human comprehension and marked with a sign reading 'god is here'."
One of the most interesting things we see from history is the way god retreats as our understanding of the physical world advances. Religions have always tried to fill in gaps in our understanding by saying "if there's something we don't understand, god did it," but the more we learn, the less space is left for god.
There is nothing particularly magical about life; we're closing in on the ability to create a living organism entirely from scratch, and if you don't accept that Dr. Ventnor has done that yet, the question will become academic soon. The more our knowledge of the physical world advances, the more we realize that things we used to think of as magic are simply the operation of natural law.
And that's a good thing, just for the record.
If you start with the premise that we are fallen from grace, created perfect by a perfect divinity and then corrupted, then we are doomed to being nothing more than we are right now. If you accept the premise that we are the wonderful, amazing, awe-inspiring result of the natural workings of the physical world, then there is no limit, save for those imposed by the laws of physics themselves, to the altitude we can soar.
Some people find that frightening, and want to put limits on how high we can fly. Those limits are almost invariably called 'god'. I don't buy it history shows us too many examples of how these cries of 'playing god' have been false.
