Origin of life dilemma
by Geoff Chapman
Every child asks, “Where did I come from?” and secular scientists still don’t know
People once believed that frogs were generated from mud, mice from rags and wheat, and maggots from rotting meat.
Those ideas of “spontaneous generation” have long since been discarded, but the origin of life is one of the biggest problems facing secular scientists.
The usual theory that the first life on earth came from non-life by natural processes has become even more problematic, because we have learned so much about the complexity of our amazing cells.
Some scientists have even suggested that the origin of life can be traced to aliens who dumped their trash on Earth
In the 19th century, people thought the cell was just a little blob of jelly enclosed by a membrane. So Charles Darwin suggested that life may have originated in some “warm little pond” where “a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.” But he didn’t have the benefit of powerful electron microscopes, which have revealed the wonders of a living cell and he knew nothing of the DNA code.
Famous scientist Louis Pasteur conducted experiments which proved that life couldn’t arise from non-living matter, and described those who believed otherwise as “deluded.” However, some modern theories seem just as far-fetched.
The late atheist and Nobel Prize winner Dr Francis Crick wrote: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
So, did Francis Crick conclude that life must have been created? Not at all! He proposed “directed panspermia” — the theory that life originated elsewhere in the universe, and that earth was ‘seeded’ with microorganisms sent on some form of spaceship by an advanced civilization.1
“The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle” – Nobel Laureate Dr Francis Crick
Some scientists have even suggested that life developed from microbes in the trash dumped by passing aliens! Others proposed that the ingredients of life “hitchhiked” on a meteorite or comet, which dumped them on the earth, where they evolved into all the life on earth today.
These proposed solutions don’t explain the origin of life itself, and they all seem to miss the fact that life is more than chemicals that just needed to be “sparked” into life. Even the simplest forms of life are based on information — complex coded instructions in their DNA.
Coded information is never produced by chance — an intelligent mind has to be behind it
Software expert Bill Gates wrote: “Human DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” Random chance processes don’t produce computer software!
There is still an unbridgeable chasm between non-living matter and even the simplest form of life. Coded information is never produced by chance — an intelligent mind has to be behind it.
Which is easier to believe – that chance processes produced living organisms, even though all the evidence is against it, or that life was created in the beginning by God, and Jesus Christ his only Son, “through whom all things were made”? (John 1: 3)
References: 1: Life Itself, 1981
Geoff Chapman is Director of Creation Resources Trust