How Did Life Begin?

How Did Life Begin?

Introduction
1. Purpose of apologetics
2. The biggest problem facing evolutionists is molecular biology and the rise of life out of non-living matter.

I. Prescientific Theories of Spontaneous Generation
A. Aristotle
1. Aristotle even believed that under the proper conditions putatively “simple” animals such as worms, fleas, mice, and dogs could spring to life spontaneously from moist ”Mother Earth."
2. Others believed that life had existed on earth for ever. This view is not supported by scientific observation today.

B. Middle Ages
1. Such "spontaneous generation" appeared to occur primarily in decaying matter. For example, a seventeenth century recipe for the spontaneous production of mice required placing sweaty underwear and husks of wheat in an open-mouthed jar, then waiting for about 21 days, during which time it was alleged that the sweat from the underwear would penetrate the husks of wheat, changing them into mice. Although such a concept may seem laughable today, it is consistent with the other widely held cultural and religious beliefs of the time.
2. Maggots were thought to spontaneously generate from rotting meat

C. The death of spontaneous generation
1. Francesco Redi (1668) proved that maggots came from eggs laid by flies on the meat. The invention of the microscope only served to enhance this belief. Microscopy revealed a whole new world of organisms that appeared to arise spontaneously.
2. Lazzaro Spallanzani (1745) replicated experiements which were thought to prove spontaneous generation, but sealed the flask, not allowing outside microorganisms in.
3. The young French chemist, Louis Pasteur (1859) boiled meat broth in a flask, heated the neck of the flask in a flame until it became pliable, and bent it into the shape of an S. Air could enter the flask, but airborne microorganisms could not - they would settle by gravity in the neck. As Pasteur had expected, no microorganisms grew. When Pasteur tilted the flask so that the broth reached the lowest point in the neck, where any airborne particles would have settled, the broth rapidly became cloudy with life. Pasteur had both refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and convincingly demonstrated that microorganisms are everywhere - even in the air.


II. Abiogenesis
A. What is abiogenesis?
1.
1 Certain simple molecules underwent spontaneous, random chemical reactions until after about half-a-billion years complex organic molecules were produced. .
2 Molecules that could replicate eventually were formed (the most common guess is nucleic acid molecules), along with enzymes and nutrient molecules that were surrounded by membraned cells. .
3 Cells eventually somehow “learned” how to reproduce by copying a DNA molecule (which contains a complete set of instructions for building a next generation of cells). During the reproduction process, the mutations changed the DNA code and produced cells that differed from the originals. .
4 The variety of cells generated by this process eventually developed the machinery required to do all that was necessary to survive, reproduce, and create the next generation of cells in their likeness. Those cells that were better able to survive became more numerous in the population (adapted from Wynn and Wiggins, 1997, p. 172).
2. The major links in the molecules-to-man theory that must be bridged include
(a) evolution of simple molecules into complex molecules,
(b) evolution of complex molecules into simple organic molecules,
(c) evolution of simple organic molecules into complex organic molecules,
(d) eventual evolution of complex organic molecules into DNA or similar information storage molecules, and
(e) eventually evolution into the first cells. This process requires multimillions of links, all which either are missing or controversial.

B. Primordial Soup
1. Four and a half billion years ago the young planet Earth... was almost completely engulfed by the shallow primordial seas. Powerful winds gathered random molecules from the atmosphere. Some were deposited in the seas. Tides and currents swept the molecules together. And somewhere in this ancient ocean the miracle of life began... The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan [a one-celled animal]. Millions of protozoa populated the ancient seas. These early organisms were completely self-sufficient in their sea-water world. They moved about their aquatic environment feeding on bacteria and other organisms... From these one- celled organisms evolved all life on earth (from the Emmy award winning PBS NOVA film The Miracle of Life

2. History of the theory
a. Russian scientist A.I. Oparin in the 1920s. The theory held that life evolved when organic molecules rained into the primitive oceans from an atmospheric soup of chemicals interacting with solar energy.
b. Later Haldane (1928), Bernal (1947) and Urey (1952) published their research to try to support this model, all with little success.
c. Then came what some felt was a breakthrough by Harold Urey and his graduate student Stanley Miller in the early 1950s. The most famous origin of life experiment was completed in 1953 by Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago.
The Miller/Urey experiments involved filling a sealed glass apparatus with methane, ammonia, hydrogen gases (representing what they thought composed the early atmosphere) and water vapor (to simulate the ocean). Next, they used a spark-discharge device to strike the gases in the flask with simulated lightning while a heating coil kept the water boiling. Within a few days, the water and gas mix produced a reddish stain on the sides of the flask. After analyzing the substances that had been formed, they found several types of amino acids. Eventually Miller and other scientists were able to produce 10 of the 20 amino acids required for life by techniques similar to the original Miller/ Urey experiments.
For example, equal quantities of both right- and left-handed organic molecules always were produced by the Urey/Miller procedure. In real life, nearly all amino acids found in proteins are left handed, almost all polymers of carbohydrates are right handed, and the opposite type can be toxic to the cell.
The reasons why creating life in a test tube turned out to be far more difficult than Miller or anyone else expected are numerous and include the fact that scientists now know that the complexity of life is far greater than Miller or anyone else in pre-DNA revolution 1953 ever imagined. Actually life is far more complex and contains far more information than anyone in the 1980s believed possible.
3. Problems:
a. Assumes that the atmosphere of the early earth was different from our present atmosphere. Very little scientific evidence exists for this assumption; it is postulated simply because it is necessary for the theory to work.
b. It is a theory that is based upon assumption, not observation. Life is assumed to have arisen from non-living matter, so a mechanism is sought to validate that assumption.
c. No geological evidence exists to support this theory.
d. No experiment has been conducted that has even been able to produce the building blocks of living matter, such as proteins. All experiments so far have fallen way short.
e. Even if an experiment could produce protein molecules, it would not prove that it actually happened. In fact, it would prove that intelligence is needed to produce protein molecules.
f. It is not enough to show that the building blocks of life can be created in a scientific experiment. Life is more than random molecules just as a house is more than a pile of bricks. There must be information, an intelligence that arranges those molecules and animates them. Then these entities need to be able to grow and reproduce. This is an incredible feat that could not happen by mere chance.


3. Before the explosive growth of our knowledge of the cell during the last 30 years, it was known that “the simplest bacteria are extremely complex, and the chances of their arising directly from inorganic materials, with no steps in between, are too remote to consider seriously.” (Newman, 1967, p. 662). Most major discoveries about cell biology and molecular biology have been made since then.
4. Cytologists now realize that a living cell contains hundreds of thousands of different complex parts such as various motor proteins that are assembled to produce the most complex “machine” in the Universe—a machine far more complex than the most complex Cray super computer. We now also realize after a century of research that the eukaryote protozoa thought to be as simple as a bowl of gelatin in Darwin’s day actually are enormously more complex than the prokaryote cell. Furthermore, molecular biology has demonstrated that the basic design of the cell is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals... In terms of their basic biochemical design... no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth (Denton, 1986, p. 250).
5. We now realize that the Urey/Miller experiments did not produce evidence for abiogenesis because, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, the key to life is information because, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, the key to life is information (Pigliucci, 1999; Dembski, 1998). Natural objects in forms resembling the English alphabet (circles, straight lines and similar) abound in nature, but this does not help us to understand the origin of information (such as that in Shakespear’s plays) because this task requires intelligence both to create the information (the play) and then to translate that information into symbols. What must be explained is the source of the information in the text (the words and ideas), not the existence of circles and straight lines.
6. Yet another difficulty is, even if the source of the amino acids and the many other compounds needed for life could be explained, it still must be explained as to how these many diverse elements became aggregated in the same area and then properly assembled themselves. This problem is a major stumbling block to any theory of abiogenesis: ...no one has ever satisfactorily explained how the widely distributed ingredients linked up into proteins. Presumed conditions of primordial Earth would have driven the amino acids toward lonely isolation.
7. The warm pond and hot vent theories also have been seriously disputed by experimental research that has found the half-lives of many critically important compounds needed for life to be far “too short to allow for the adequate accumulation of these compounds” (Levy and Miller, 1998, p. 7933). Furthermore, research has documented that “unless the origin of life took place extremely rapidly (in less than 100 years), we conclude that a high temperature origin of life... cannot involve adenine, uracil, guanine or cytosine” because these compounds break down far too fast in a warm environment. In a hydrothermal environment, most of these compounds could neither form in environment. In a hydrothermal environment, most of these compounds could neither form in the first place, nor exist for a significant amount of time (Levy and Miller, p. 7933). III. Did Life Come from Another Planet?

C. The probability of life arising by chance
1. A major issue then, in abiogenesis is “what is the minimum number of possible parts that allows something to live?” The number of parts needed is large, but how large is difficult to determine. In order to be considered “alive,” an organism must possess the ability to metabolize and assimilate food, to respirate, to grow, to reproduce and to respond to stimuli (a trait known as irritability).
2. As Coppedge (1973) notes, even 1) postulating a primordial sea with every single component necessary for life, 2) speeding up the bonding rate so as to form different chemical combinations a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion—a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion- year-old earth and 4) using all atoms on the earth still leaves the probability of a single protein molecule being arranged by chance is 1 in 10,261. Using the lowest estimate made before the discoveries of the past two decades raised the number several fold. Coppedge estimates the probability of 1 in 10119,879 is necessary to obtain the minimum set of the required estimate of 239 protein molecules for the smallest theoretical life form. At this rate he estimates it would require 10119,831 years on the average to obtain a set of these proteins by naturalistic evolution (1973, pp. 110, 114). The number he obtained is 10119,831 greater than the current estimate for the age of the earth (4.6 billion years). In other words, this event is outside the range of probability. Natural selection cannot occur until an organism exists and is able to reproduce which requires that the first complex life form first exist as a functioning
3. It appears that the field of molecular biology will falsify Darwinism. An estimated 100,000 different proteins are used to construct humans alone. Furthermore, one million species are known, and as many as 10 million may exist. Although many proteins are used in most life forms, as many as 100 million or more protein variations may exist in all plant and animal life.
Even using an unrealistically low estimate of 1,000 steps required to “evolve” the average protein (if this were possible) implies that many trillions of links were needed to evolve the proteins that once existed or that exist today. And not one clear transitional protein that is morphologically and chemically in between the ancient and modern form of the protein has been convincingly demonstrated. The same problem exists with fats, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and the other compounds that are produced by, and necessary for, life.
4. Abiogenesis is only one area of research which illustrates that the naturalistic origin of life hypothesis has become less and less probable as molecular biology has progressed, and is now at the point that its plausibility appears outside the realm of probability. Numerous origin-of-life researchers, have lamented the fact that molecular biology during the past half-a-century has not been very kind to any naturalistic origin-of-life theory.

III. Did life come from outer space?
A. Popular ideas
1. Mission to Mars, War of the Worlds, UFOs
2. Asteroids, meteorites and space dust

B. Problems with this view
1. It merely pushes the problem further back in time, but it doesn’t solve it
2. If life can’t spontaneously arise here, it can’t anywhere else


Conclusion
1. How life arose from non-living matter is the greatest problem faced by evolutionists today. Very few talk about how life began because they know that they have no answers. This is the weakest point in the argument of naturalism and I feel that it is insurmountable. It takes more faith to believe that life was generated from non-living matter than to believe that God created life.
2. Life is a gift from God. God breathed into man and he became a living being. The spark of life is the result of God’s touch. All life bears the special mark of God.
3. You are alive because God gave you life. Your life is totally in his hands. You are dependent upon him for your very existence. Every breath you take is a gift from God. Don’t take life lightly but realize how precious it is and live it for the glory of God.