Humanity can already create life.
Creating conscious entirely artificial things is a different pair of shoes.
I would cut out the whole religious “god-like” mumbo-jumbo though, because that does not necessitate any progress in such research directions.
Maybe just uneducated in how LLMs work. If you have no sufficient understanding of the technology it is easy to be impressed how human-like LLMs talk to you, almost magical.
It foreshadows an issue that will be a reality one day nevertheless. The work on AI continues. We may one day very well have conscious AI. This will be the start of a whole bunch of ethical and legal problems. It might be meaningful to regulate / guardrail such research directions.
Pregnant people must scare you. As do synthetic bacterial cells, artificially synthesized viruses, cloning, organoids, etc.
I am talking rather about the Sci than the Fi.
Define “god-like” if you do not mean it in a religious manner.
Regarding your question: it makes sense to continue research and educate people, yes.
Are you really requiring that we allow research in one field only after we have advanced research in another entirely different field? That seems arbitrary.