The Origin of Life by Dr. David N. Menton, Ph.D. Copyright (c) 1993 by the Missouri Associ
The Origin of Life
by Dr. David N. Menton, Ph.D.
Copyright (c) 1993 by the Missouri Association for Creation
[No. 2 in a series]
One of the most fundamental axioms of biology is that all life
comes from pre-existing life. Still, until the later part of the 19th
century, life was believed to arise from non-living matter by a process
called "spontaneous generation." Ancient Egyptians, for example,
thought mice arose from the mud of the Nile. In 1600, J. B. Helmont
even reported "proof" for the spontaneous generation of mice claiming
that if wheat, cheese, and soiled linen are placed together in a jar,
mice will eventually appear! This idea of the spontaneous generation of
life from non-life was so deeply ingrained in biological thought that it
took nearly 200 years of experimental evidence to completely disprove
it.
In 1650, Francesco Redi, an Italian physician, proved that
maggots come from living flies and not from lifeless meat as was widely
believed. This was a serious blow to spontaneous generation, but when
bacteria were later discovered, it was thought that at least
micro-organisms might arise from non-life. This too was finally laid to
rest in 1864 by the great scientist (and creationist) Louis Pasteur, who
demonstrated that bacteria can only come from living bacteria. When
Pasteur reported his results before the French Academy he confidently
declared that, "never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation arise
from this mortal blow." Pasteur never dreamed that the widely
discredited evolutionary ideas of his contemporary, Charles Darwin,
would one day become widely accepted by the scientific community,
reviving once again the notion of spontaneous generation. In his book,
The Origins of Life, evolutionist Cyril Ponnamperuma said:
"It is, perhaps, ironic that we tell beginning students in
biology about Pasteur's experiments as the triumph of reason over
mysticism yet we are coming back to spontaneous generation,
albeit in a more refined and scientific sense, namely to chemical
evolution."
Most evolutionists are dead certain that life evolved by chance
(without divine intervention) from non-living chemicals through a
process called "chemical evolution." Some evolutionists even insist that
life must have independently evolved more than once on earth. Most
evolutionists are confident that life has evolved many times in many
other places in the universe.
Although Darwin spoke longingly of the chance origin of life
from simple chemicals in some "warm little pond," there has never been
evidence that anything like this has ever happened. In fact, the
evidence for chemical evolution is so embarrassing, some evolutionists
insist that the whole idea of the origin of life is not even a part of
the theory of evolution but rather is a creationist plot to discredit
evolution!
Evolutionists speculate that life gradually evolved from mere
hydrogen in a series of stages. The first stage began about 15 billion
years ago with the "Big Bang" which produced an expanding cloud of
hydrogen gas -- all else was void. With time and energy, hydrogen
transformed into all the other chemical elements. Then, about 4 billion
years ago, the earth's atmosphere consisted of methane, ammonia,
hydrogen and water, from which life would inevitably evolve.
During stage two it is believed that simple chemicals from stage
one formed the small organic molecules essential to life such as sugars,
amino acids and nucleotides. In 1953, Miller and Urey claimed to
"simulate" the evolution of some of these organic molecules from methane
and ammonia using apparatus and conditions designed to achieve the
desired result.
Stage three in chemical evolution is supposed to have involved
the stringing together of small organic molecules into long chain-like
molecules called polymers. The most important biological polymers are
starches (polymers of sugars), proteins (polymers of amino acids), and
DNA (polymers of nucleotides). In another "evolution simulation"
experiment, Sidney Fox produced protein-like molecules by heating pure-
dry amino acids at high temperatures. When this material was allowed to
cool in water it formed small globules which he called "microspheres."
Although these microspheres are stone dead, evolutionists refer to them
as "protocells," implying they represent an early stage of living cells.
In fact, about the only similarity between microspheres and living cells
is they are, as their name implies, small and spherical.
The final stage of chemical evolution involves the chance
transformation of organic molecules and polymers into the unfathomably
complex machinery of living cells. Here evolutionary speculation is so
unrestrained by evidence, or even plausibility, that it fails to merit
serious consideration. The molecular biologist scientist Dr. David
Green pretty well summed it up when he said in his book _Molecular
Insights into the Living Process_:
".. the macromolecule-to-cell transition is a jump of fantastic
dimensions, which lies beyond the range of testable hypothesis.
In this area all is conjecture. The available facts do not
provide a basis for postulating that cells arose on this
planet." Evolutionists have tried to get around this problem by
invoking long periods of time in the hope that, given enough
time, virtually anything is possible -- except, of course,
special creation.
Now even some evolutionists fear that time and chance may not be
the answer. The Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA),
in his book _Life Itself_, insists that the probability of life's chance
origin simply defies calculation. Crick, an atheist, says:
"What is so frustrating for our present purpose is that it seems
almost impossible to give any numerical value to the probability
of what seems a rather unlikely sequence of events....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.."
Incredibly, Crick concludes that the first living organisms on earth may
have been "seeded" in our oceans by intelligent beings from another
planet!
Sir Fred Hoyle, father of the "Big Bang" theory, has recently
concluded that the origin of life by chance is an absurd idea. In his
book _Evolution From Space_, Hoyle insists that it is obvious that the
complexity of life demands an intelligent designer, possibly even
(heaven forbid!) God. According to Hoyle: "Once we see, however, that
the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as
to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable
properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect
deliberate. ... It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure
of intelligence must reflect... higher intelligences... even to the
limit of God... such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is
not widely accepted as being self-evident."
In a recent address at Cal Tech, Hoyle said that no amount of
time now being considered by evolutionists is even remotely adequate to
accomplish the formation of a higher living organism by chance. Such an
event, he said, would be comparable to the chance that "a tornado
sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from materials
therein"!
Evolutionists, who must essentially invoke miracles without God,
have no other choice than to believe in chance events so improbable they
undermine the statistical foundation on which modern science rests. In
his book _Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to Creation of Life on Earth_,
evolutionist Robert Shapiro abandons all skepticism and lamely argues:
"One escape hatch yet exists for spontaneous generation. Why
need the event have been probable? We can just stare at the
odds, shrug, and note with thanks how lucky we were... After
all, improbable events occur all the time."
Think of it, with an unquestioning faith like this in God, we Christians
could move mountains!
Dr. Menton received his Ph.D. in Biology from Brown University. He has
been involved in biomedical research and education for over 30 years.
*******************
Originally published in:
St. Louis MetroVoice, August 1993, Vol. 3, No. 8
Electronically distributed through the Missouri Association for Creation
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