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Is
spontaneous generation possible? The
biggest hurdle for the theory of evolution is the creation of the first cell,
since the processes of natural selection and genetic mutation are inapplicable
at that point. Instead, the first
self-replicating cell had to occur by random probabilistic chance. Many evolutionists, when they feel candid,
have made concessions on this subject, which destroys the intellectual
foundation of their entire materialistic worldview. For example, the physicist
H.S. Lipson, Physics Bulletin, 1980, Vol. 31, p. 138, once
conceded. “The only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists,
as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if
the experimental evidence supports it.”
Obviously, he made this public admission only under the strongest kind
of intellectual compulsion; he wasn’t optimistically sanguine about the
possibility that spontaneous generation could have occurred. Evolutionist Loren Eiseley, The Immense
Journey (New York, 1957), p. 199 admitted the philosophical inconsistency
of his own side about this matter:
“After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and
miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a
mythology of its own: Namely, the
assumption that what, after long effort, could not be prove to take place today
had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.” Dr. George Wald, a Nobel prize winner and Harvard biology
professor, “The Origin of Life,” The Physics and Chemistry of Life
(Simon and Shuster, 1955), p. 9, made this concession: “One has only to contemplate the magnitude
of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is
impossible. Yet here we are--as a
result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.”
If Christians had the same amount of faith as this evolutionist, they
would be moving mountains daily as warm-up exercises! Perhaps for this reason and others, Wald eventually ended up
embracing some kind of pantheism, although he was an agnostic or atheist when
making this confession. The results of
“origin of life experiments” and other research haven’t improved the situation
any since the mathematician J.W.N. Sullivan, Reader’s Digest, January
1963, p. 92, confessed: “The hypothesis that life has developed from inorganic
matter is, at present, still an article of faith.”
So
with a sufficient number of eons and oceans, would life inevitably occur by
chance? Time cannot be the hero of the
plot for evolutionists when even many billions of years are insufficient. But this can only be known when the
mathematical probabilities involved are carefully quantified, which is crucial
to all scientific observations. That
is, specific mathematical equations describing what scientists observed need to
be set up in order to describe how likely or unlikely this or that event
was. But so long as evolutionists tell
a general “just-so” story without specific mathematical descriptions, much like
the ancient pagan creation myths retold over the generations, many listeners
will find their tale persuasive. For
example, upon the first recounting, listeners may find it plausible to believe
the evolutionists’ story about the first living cell arising by random chance
out of a “chemical soup” in the world’s oceans. But after specific mathematical calculations are applied to their
claim, it is plainly absurd to believe in spontaneous generation, which says
life comes from non-living materials. At one academic conference of mathematicians, engineers, and
biologists entitled, “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian
Interpretation of Evolution,” (published 1967) these kinds of probabilities
were applied to evolutionary claims.[1] One professor of electrical engineering at
the conference, Murray Eden, calculated that even if a common species of
bacteria received five billion years and was placed an inch thick on the earth,
it couldn’t create by accident a pair of genes. Many other specific estimates
like these could easily be devised to test the truthfulness of Darwinism,
including the likelihood of various transitional forms of plants and animals
being formed by chance mutations and natural selection.
The
astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Evolution From Space,” p. 24, once described the chances against certain parts of the first living cell
to occur by random chance through a chemical accident. “Consider now
the chance that in a random ordering of the twenty different amino acids which
make up the polypeptides; it just happens that the different kinds fall into
the order appropriate to a particular enzyme [an organic catalyst--a chemical
which speeds up chemical reactions--EVS]. The chance of obtaining a
suitable backbone [substrate] can hardly be greater than on part in 10[raised
by]15, and the chance of obtaining the appropriate active site can
hardly be greater than on part in 10 [raised by]5. Because
the fine details of the surface shape [of the enzyme in a living cell--EVS] can
be varied we shall take the conservative line of not “piling on the agony” by
including any further small probability for the rest of the
enzyme. The two small probabilities are enough. They have
to be multiplied, when they yield a chance of one part in 10[raised by]20 of
obtaining the required in a functioning form [when randomly created by chance
out of an ocean of amino acids--EVS]. By itself , this small
probability could be faced, because one must contemplate not just a single shot
at obtaining the enzyme, but a very large number of trials as are supposed to
have occurred in an organize soup early in the history of the
Earth. The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes and
the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10
[raised by]20)2000 = 10 [raised by]40,000, an
outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole
universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either
by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life
originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely our of
court.” To put this calculation into
some kind of context, the number of electrons within the universe that can be
observed by mankind’s largest earth-based telescopes is approximately 10 raised
by the 87 and the number of atoms is about 10 raised to the 80. [2] By contrast, these two astronomers maintain the chances of
spontaneous generation is one out of one followed by 40,000 zeros, which would require
about five pages of a standard-sized magazine to print.
Let’s
consider another colorful concession by Sir Fred Hoyle (“The Big Bang in
Astronomy,” New Scientist, vol. 92 (November 19, 1981), p. 527, emphasis
removed: “At all events, anyone with
even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the
near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the
cubic faces at random. [Henry Morris
comments that there are 4 X 10 raised to the 19 power combinations of the Rubik
Cube]. Now imagine 10 raised to 50
blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the
chance of all of them simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by
random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life
depends. The notion that not only the
biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arried at by
chance in a primordial organic soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a
high order. Life must plainly be a
cosmic phenomenon.” Hoyle and Wickramasinghe both became believers in
pantheism and panspermia, the belief that life originated on other planet(s) in
outer space, because they saw no way that life could have arisen on earth by
purely mechanistic biochemical processes.
In
order for the first self-replicating cell to be created by random chance out of
a “prebiotic soup” in the ancient ocean, several major hurdles have to be
successfully jumped. 1. The right atmospheric and oceanic
meteorological and other conditions must exist. 2. The oceans need to
have a sufficient quantity and concentration of “simple” molecules in the
“organic soup.” 3. A sufficient number of specifically needed
proteins and nucleotides randomly combine together and acquire a semi-permeable
membrane around them. 4. They also develop a genetic code using DNA
and replicate themselves using RNA and DNA information. Notice that all of this supposedly occurred
in the non-observed past; it’s merely assumed to have happened based upon
materialistic philosophy projecting its assumptions of naturalism infinitely
into the past. It’s equally presumed to
never have happened again.
In
this context, consider some details of the old “origin of life” experiments of
Stanley Miller back in 1953. Using a
chosen concoction of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water, he got just four of
the 20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, for making life. Note also that he had to “save” them from
the area of sparks in his lab equipment since what created them also would have
destroyed them if he hadn’t removed them by his own deliberate
intervention. Even through intentionally contrived, designed
experiments over the next 30 years, scientists weren’t able to create all 20
amino acids under the conditions that they deemed to be plausible. And what is arbitrarily being deemed to be
“plausible”? Hitching, in the “Neck of
the Giraffe,” p. 65 explains the dilemma involved: “With oxygen in the air, the first amino acid would never have
got started; without oxygen, it would have been wiped out by cosmic rays.” After all, does anyone really “know” what
the earth’s atmosphere was like billions of years ago? Furthermore, even when oxygen is present,
sunlight’s ultraviolet radiation remains a deadly enemy of a pro-biotic soup’s
complexity. Water “naturally inhibits
the development of more complex molecules,” as Hitching admits. The basic problem is that water naturally
promotes the breaking up of long molecules, not their generation. George Wald, already quoted from above,
points out (“Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life, “Scientific American,”
August 1954, pp. 49, 50: “Spontaneous
dissolution is much more probable, and hence proceeds much more rapidly, than
spontaneous synthesis.” So why would
any “pre-biotic soup” ever accumulate to begin with? He saw this as “the most stubborn problem that confronts
us.” The principle here is that
entropy, as per the second law of thermodynamics, is inevitably much greater
than any organizational principle; it’s deception to compare the organization
of an inorganic crystal with that of biological life, which would be like
confusing the making of a single brick with constructing the Empire State
Building.
Now
there is another set of problems that confronts the proponents of spontaneous
generation. Naturally, over 100 amino
acids exist, but only 20 of them are needed for life; the rest are useless junk
that would interfere in the generation of life. The molecules, for both amino acids in all proteins and for all
nucleotides in nucleic acids, also have to be all “left-handed” in form; not
one is “right-handed.” So as the
specific details of the pre-biotic soup’s composition are examined, it becomes
more and more evident that only very specific kinds of molecules (amino acids
and the proteins formed from them) are helpful to generating life; the rest of
the randomly generated chemicals would be useless floating junk that would
interfere with the evolutionist’s desired outcome. Consider this analogy: Suppose
someone had a big pile of white and read beans together that represent this
prebiotic soup. There are over a
hundred kinds of each one. The red ones
are right-handed, and the white ones left-handed. In a random scoop, what is the chance that someone would pull out
not only twenty specific “white” ones, but each one would have to be in a
specific place and position relative to the others with nothing else
interfering or blocking the chemical reactions needed for self-replication? (See generally, “Life—How Did It Get
Here? By Evolution or By Creation,” pp.
39-45).
Now
it’s necessary to keep in mind that protein molecules themselves, let alone RNA
and DNA ones, are extremely complex. It
has been calculated that the chance for generating even a complex protein
molecule is one out of 10 raised to 113, which is many orders of magnitude
greater than the number of electrons in the observable universe, which is
roughly 10 raised to the 87. Francis
Crick himself, famous for being one of the co-discoverers of the DNA molecule’s
role in making life, calculated the chance of making a particular amino acid
(polypeptide chain) sequence by chance.
If it is 200 amino acids long, which is less than the average length of
a protein, there are 20 possibilities at each location in the chain. He calculated that the possibility of having
a specific protein to be simply 20 raised by 200, as this is an exercise in
calculating combinatorials or factorials.
As he concluded, “The great majority of sequences can never have been
synthesized at all, at any time.” For
these reasons, he confessed: “An honest
man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could 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.” (Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), pp, 52,
88.
It’s
one thing to have a specific quantity of highly specific proteins in the right
positions relative to each other, which is hard enough; it’s quite another to
have the machinery in place, using the incredibly complex DNA and RNA
molecules, to replicate and manufacture more of them in specifically needed
quantities. Scott Andrew, in “Update on
Genesis,” in “New Scientist, vol. 106 (May 2, 1985), pp. 31 perceived the
“chicken-and-egg” dilemma: “Nucleic
acids are required to make proteins, whereas proteins are needed to make
nucleic acids and also to allow them to direct the process of protein manufacture
itself.” Proteins depend on DNA to be
formed, yet DNA cannot form without pre-existing proteins. It’s once again the problem of “all or
nothing,” which so frequently confronts evolutionists, as per Michael Behe’s
mousetrap analogy. Andrew further
describes the problem involved (p. 32), “The emergence of the gene-protein
link, an absolutely vital stage on the way up from lifeless atoms to ourselves,
is still shrouded in almost complete mystery.”
So then, he made this honest confession (p. 33): “In their more public pronouncements,
researchers interested in the origin of life sometimes behave a bit like the
creationist opponents they so despise—glossing over the great mysteries that
remain unsolved and pretending they have firm answers that they have not really
got. . . . We still know very little
about how our genesis came about, and to provide a more satisfactory account
than we have at present remains one of science’s great challenges.” John Horgan, “In the Beginning,” Scientific
American, vol. 264 (February 1991), p. 119 conceded how hard it was to create
RNA molecules in a laboratory by deliberate intention: “How did RNA arise initially? RNA and its
components are difficult to synthesize
in a laboratory under the best of conditions, much less under plausible
prebiotic ones.” Leslie E. Orgel, “The
Origin of Life on the Earth,” Scientific American, vol. 271 (October 1994), p.
78, proposed the idea that RNA came first, but then noticed two key problems with
that hypothesis: “This scenario could
have occurred, we noted, if prebiotic RNA had two properties not evident
today: a capacity to replicate without
the help of proteins and an ability to catalyze every step of the protein
synthesis.”
Much
more could be said about the problems that spontaneous generation confronts the
proponents of evolution. For example,
the problem of the random generation of photosynthesis, the process by which
light energy is chanced into chemical energy by plants, could be examined in
detail. Once the specifics are examined
and detailed, and mathematical calculations are made about the chances of
organic molecules being formed, it becomes totally implausible to
non-prejudiced minds. Nature can’t
always explain nature; the inference to the supernatural is the only reasonable
explanation when confronted with such high odds. Sir Fred Hoyle once compared the chance of life’s formation
through random organization to that of “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard
might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.” (“Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, vol. 294,
November 12, 1981, p. 105. Hoyle and
Wickramasinghe, “Evolution from Space” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 184, made this point against
those who believe in a purely materialistic origin of life by random
chance: “No matter how large the
environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random
on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical
reason that the whole observable universe it not large enough to contain the
necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly not the waste
paper baskets for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material. . . . The likelihood of the
spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter if one to a number with
40,000 noughts after it. . . . It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole
theory of evolution. There was no
primeval soup, neither on this plant nor on another other, and if the beginnings
of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of
purposeful intelligence.” When it is
recalled who makes this kind of concession, men who had been utterly
materialistic skeptics, it is devastating to anyone trying to making the case
that life had a purely mechanistic, random origin in the mixing of chemicals.
When
confronted with these kinds of calculations that show life couldn’t have
occurred by biochemical accident, atheistic and agnostic evolutionists may
resort to two potential escape hatches.
One of them is the “multiverse” metaphysical concept. When there isn’t enough space, matter, and
time to create life by chance in the universe that we humans can sense, they
argue that there are an infinite number of parallel universes. Given an infinite amount of time, matter,
and space, life indeed could have occurred by chance. Peter T. Mora, “The Folly of Probability,” in “The Origins of
Prebiological Systems, ed. Sydney Fox (New York: Academic Press, 1965), p. 45, perceives the problem with
engaging in such philosophical inquiries:
“I believe we developed this practice (i.e., postulating prebiological
natural selection) to avoid facing the conclusion that the probability of a
self-replicating state is zero. . . . .
When for practical purposes the concept of infinite time and matter has
to be invoked, that concept of probability is annulled. By such logic we can prove anything, such as
that, no matter how complex, everything will repeat itself, exactly and
immeasurably.” Notice that the
existence of “multiverses” parallel to our universe can’t be proven
experimentally or sensed directly. It’s
merely the secular version of invoking a unrepeatable miracle to prove that
something occurred in the unobserved past.
Furthermore, as the creationist David F. Coppedge observed, “There’s
Only One Universe,” Back to Genesis, No. 216, December 2006, p. d, the blunt
tool of “Occam’s Razor would surely prefer a single Designer to uncountable
universes.” This concept also
contradicts the big bang theory, which maintains that the universe had a
beginning, instead of being eternal. By
invoking parallel “multiverses,” the evolutionists are obviously engaged in a
post-hoc modification to escape the falsification of their theory by simple
mathematical calculations.
Then
there’s another escape hatch that evolutionists will resort to at this point,
with their backs against a metaphysical wall as they face a statistical firing
squad: “Everything is rare.” For example, if we drive to work, the car in
front of us will have a license plate number.
If there are (say) 4 million cars with license plates in that state, the
a priori chance of driving behind that particular car with another one is one
in four million in a given day. The
absurdity of this kind of argument can be easily exposed. For example, in order to play Mega Millions,
players choose six different numbers for each lottery ticket. The chance of
winning the jackpot is officially pegged at 1 in 302,575,350. A priori, the chance of each computer-generated
“easy pick” ticket winning this jackpot is the same as the ticket that actually
does win the jackpot. Furthermore, the
six numbers on each ticket are just as unlikely to be randomly generated as those
on any other. So if a player buys a ticket
with a randomly chosen number, it’s just as “rare” as any other. However, almost of these equally “rare”
tickets are utterly, completely worthless.
The only one that matters is the one chosen by the organization managing
the lottery. Likewise, almost all the
“rare” biochemical events that would occur in a prebiotic soup are utterly,
completely worthless. Only the one that
creates a self-replicating cell counts, not all the equally rare failed
attempts. We should intuitively
perceive the nonsense of this kind of argument, even when clever,
sophisticated, credentialed academics promote it.
So
when the specific details of spontaneous generation are examined, it becomes
utterly absurd to believe that the first self-replicating cell was the result of
a biochemical accident somewhere in an ancient ocean. Specific quantitative calculations about the likelihood of such
an accident are simply devastating to the purely materialistic version of the
theory of evolution. The idea that RNA,
DNA, and the related necessary proteins all occurred together in one place
inside a semi-permeable membrane is the purest poppycock. Evolution is a long modern mythological
story without a good intellectual foundation.
It’s far more rational to infer that God created life than to believe
that it occurred by chance. Clearly,
when these long odds are considered, David was right (Psalm 14:1): “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is
no God.’”
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