My husband and I were recently visiting with our grandchildren in the Lower 48 and found ourselves watching a show called Wild Kratts, which teaches children about animals and their habitats. The episode we watched concerned the Butternut Tree and its possible extinction, taking the audience through the life of a Butternut tree from nut to full-grown tree. The lesson, as deduced by my grandchildren, was this: all life comes from life. This gave me the inspiration for this article about the enduring wisdom of Natural Law and the One who set it all in motion.
This fundamental principle does not require human action to unfold. A flower naturally develops according to the wisdom of the Creator, the initial Mover. Left solely to nature, life continues toward its natural end. Only a flower can beget a flower. A bee may assist with pollination, yet a bee never becomes a flower. In the same natural sense, only a human can beget a human. Left to the beauty and wisdom of Natural Law, only humans make humans— living, breathing, growing, learning beings who, when fully developed, are capable of recreating through procreation. This truth aligns with the observed order of creation.
We can mimic creation through technology and innovation, but even the highest human intelligence cannot create something out of nothing. Every inventive process begins with what already exists, for created beings possess no power to originate ex nihilo. In the realm of artificial intelligence, this limitation is starkly apparent: AI is only as good as its human creators. While AI can generate impressive simulations, it will never generate new life or possess consciousness. There is a Prime Mover, and all that is was set in motion by Him alone.
The greatest scientific minds have illuminated these realities without contradiction between faith and reason. Consider Louis Pasteur, the devout Catholic scientist whose rigorous experiments established the law of biogenesis. Through his famous swan-neck flask experiments in the 1860s, Pasteur conclusively demonstrated that spontaneous generation does not occur under natural conditions, concluding that life arises only from pre-existing life—Omne vivum ex vivo—all life from life. His work dismantled the notion that life could emerge from non-living matter. Pasteur, who viewed science as bringing humanity closer to God, affirmed what Natural Law had long suggested: life begets life according to its kind.
This specificity of kind finds further confirmation in the work of Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian friar and Catholic priest known as the father of genetics. Through meticulous experiments with pea plants in his monastery garden, Mendel revealed the discrete, predictable patterns by which traits are inherited. His laws of segregation and independent assortment showed that organisms pass on characteristics to offspring of the same kind. A pea plant produces more pea plants; it does not produce flowers of another species or animals. Mendel’s discoveries underscore that only like begets like— only a flower begets a flower, and only humans beget humans.
For human beings, God’s Truth deepens this understanding. While parents contribute the genetic material and the developing body through procreation, the spiritual soul— which grounds human consciousness, intellect, and will— is created immediately by God at the moment of conception. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God— it is not ‘produced’ by the parents —and also that it is immortal.” While humans participate in bringing forth new human life, the unique, immaterial dimension of consciousness ultimately traces to the Creator. No laboratory, algorithm, or artificial intelligence system can imbue true consciousness or generate new life, for the created thing can never exceed the capacities of its human creators in this fundamental respect.
The cosmos itself points to a beginning and a Prime Mover. The Belgian Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître proposed the “primeval atom” hypothesis in 1931— the foundational idea of what became known as the Big Bang theory. He demonstrated that the universe is expanding and must have originated from an extremely dense initial state at a finite point in time. Albert Einstein, initially skeptical, later praised Lemaître’s work as “the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation.” Lemaître’s model aligns with a universe that is not eternal or self-existent but set in motion by the Unmoved Mover. Basically, what this comes down to is the omnipotent Creator, pronouncing His fiat lux– “Let there be light” and over billions of years, according to His laws creation unfolded. The whole process, however, points to an origin that transcends material causation alone.
We can devise remarkable technologies using our God-given intelligence, but these remain rearrangements of what already exists. We clone animals, engineer crops, and build sophisticated machines and AI systems that simulate aspects of intelligence, yet none creates life from non-life or true consciousness from inert matter. Machines and algorithms, however advanced, operate according to programmed rules; they lack the interiority, self-awareness, and moral freedom that define human consciousness.
This recognition carries profound implications. It affirms human dignity: every person bears an immortal soul, a direct gift from the Creator. It calls us to humility before the mystery of life. When we honor Natural Law by respecting the order of procreation, protecting nascent human life, and stewarding creation; we cooperate with the wisdom of the initial Mover rather than presuming to supplant it.
Through the inspired work of scientists like Pasteur, Mendel, and Lemaître, and through the unchanging Word of God, the Truth remains accessible. The evidence of life from life, the specificity of kinds, the beginning of the cosmos, and the irreducibility of consciousness all converge on one conclusion: there is a Prime Mover, the great I AM, who alone creates and sustains all that is. In Him we live and move and have our being.
