CHAPTER THREE
HOW DID LIFE BEGIN?
EVOLUTION TELLS us that life evolved from something. However, the question may be asked where rocks came from. Rocks are not “life.” They don’t have a brain or a heart, lungs, or blood. Rocks don’t reproduce themselves, unless you call breaking in half “reproduction.” A rock doesn’t fit into the normal definition of life. So where did they come from? The evolutionary explanation is that suns exploded and cooled down over billions of years. Hence, rocks. Ask then where did the suns come from and you will hear that all of them started from a tiny “dot” that is smaller than a period at the end of a sentence. Ask where the dot came from and they will say that they don’t know. The origin of life to the Genesisophobic is the big mystery. Still, that doesn’t stop them from having ideas. Ask A Scientist answers the question of life’s origin this way:
The origin comes from these general ideas:
Notice that any thought that God could be the genesis of life is dismissed as pseudoscience. He doesn’t know how life began, but he does know that God had nothing to do with it. When Andrew Knoll, professor of biology at Harvard was asked, “How does life form?” he responded, “The short answer is we don’t really know how life originated on this planet. There have been a variety of experiments that tell us some possible roads, but we remain in substantial ignorance.”
Time magazine said:
This summer a startling, if still sketchy, synthesis of the new ideas emerged during a weeklong meeting of origin-of life researchers in Barcelona, Spain. Life, it now appears, did not dawdle at the starting gate, but rushed forth at full gallop. UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf reported finding fossilized imprints of a thriving microbial community sandwiched between layers of rock that is 3.5 billion years old. This, along with other evidence, shows that life was well established only a billion years after the earth’s formation, a much faster evolution than previously thought. Life did not arise under calm, benign conditions, as once assumed, but under the hellish skies of a planet racked by volcanic eruptions and menaced by comets and asteroids. In fact, the intruders from outer space may have delivered the raw materials necessary for life. So robust were the forces that gave rise to the first living organisms that it is entirely possible, many researchers believe, that life began not once but several times before it finally “took” and colonized the planet.
Perhaps it was Time magazine’s “intruders from outer space” that provided the seed for Richard Dawkin’s believing that some intelligent visiting alien started life. Professor Dawkins said: It could come about in the following way:
It could be that, at some earlier time somewhere in the universe a civilization evolved by probably by some kind of Darwinian means to a very very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet…and that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe.”
He’s not alone with his celestial thoughts: “Chandra Wickramasinghe from Cardiff University, UK, has long argued the case for cometary panspermia, the idea that comets are infected with primitive life forms and delivered life to the early Earth. That would explain why life on Earth arose so quickly after our planet formed around 4.5 billion years ago.”
So if comets are responsible for coming to this earth, carrying life forms, where did they come from? Who made them? Why were there life forms on the comets? For the answer, scientists go back to the original dreamer. He had the “conceptual might” to imagine a possible scenario:
It took the conceptual might of Charles Darwin to imagine a biologically plausible scenario for life’s emergence. In an oft quoted letter, written in 1871, Darwin suggested that life arose in a “warm little pond” where a rich brew of organic chemicals, over eons of time, might have given rise to the first simple organisms. For the next century, Darwin’s agreeable hypothesis, expanded upon by other theorists, dominated thinking on the subject. Researchers decided that the “pond” was really the ocean and began trying to figure out where the building blocks of life could have come from.”
But Darwin’s “warm little pond” opens a can of worms. Where did it come from, and why was there a “rich brew of organic chemicals” in the pond? It doesn’t answer where life came from at all. Besides, scientists now believe that his pond was actually an ocean, which just makes the problem of where it came from larger and deeper.
Meanwhile, older and older fossils have all but proved that life did not evolve at the leisurely pace Darwin envisioned. Perhaps most intriguing of all, the discovery of organisms living in oceanic hot springs has provided a Stygian alternative to Darwin’s peaceful picture. Life, says microbiologist Karl Stetter of the University of Regensburg in Germany, may not have formed in a nice, warm pond, but in “a hot pressure cooker.”
If scientists have, by and large, tossed out the old ideas, they have not yet reached a consensus on the new. The current version of the story of life is a complex tale with many Darwin’s “warm little pond” opens a can of worms. Where did it come from, and why was there a “rich brew of organic chemicals” in the pond? It doesn’t answer where life came from at all. solid facts, many holes and no shortage of competing theories on how to fill in the missing pieces.”
In an article entitled “How Did Life Begin? New Research Suggests Meteorites May Have Helped,” Joel Kontinen writes:
Joel Kontinen Level: Platinum:
My background includes an MA in translation studies and a BA in Bible and Theology. I have written three novels in Finnish,my mother tongue.…
Since Charles Darwin’s day, theories about the birth of life have come and gone. Darwin famously speculated about life having begun in a warm pond. Researchers tested the idea in 2006 and found it wanting. They examined hot puddles in Kamchatka, Russia, and Mount Lassen in California and discovered that “hot acidic waters containing clay do not provide the right conditions for chemicals to assemble themselves into ‘pioneer organisms.’”
Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted a famous experiment in 1953. While it has been used as a propaganda device for evolution, Jonathan Wells and other Darwin skeptics have pointed out its flaws. Wells said: “The Miller-Urey experiment used a simulated atmosphere that geochemists now agree was incorrect, it was not the ‘first successful attempt to show how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth.’When conditions are changed to reflect better knowledge of the Earth’s early atmosphere, the experiment doesn’t work.”
Others have looked to outer space as a potential source of life. Sir Fred Hoyle, convinced that life could not have originated on earth, suggested that it was brought here from space.While this panspermia view has its advocates, the naturalistic answer to how life began on Earth remains as elusive
as ever.
FROM DUST TO DUST
It was the eminent scientist, Stephen Hawking, who said, “There have been various ideas, but for me the most attractive is that the universe was spontaneously created out of absolutely nothing.” So it’s not too difficult for someone to take that a step further
and believe that it was God who spontaneously created the universe from absolutely nothing.
But the Book of Genesis goes on to tell us that God then made man from the soil of the earth. What an embarrassingly unscientific statement…so it seems. According to Yale University, the elements that make up the soil are: 1. Potassium, 2. Calcium, 3.Magnesium, 4. Phosphorous, 5. Iron, and 6.Manganese.
If God made the human body from the soil, it makes sense that both the soil and the body would be made up of the same elements. Let’s then see if these six elements that are present in the soil are also in the human body:
So, is it a coincidence that the same six elements that are in the soil are also essential for the life of the human body? That’s what you and I have to figure out before death takes us into eternity…when our bodies decompose and turn back to the soil from which they came. In answer to the question, “Did life begin in an “RNA world?” L.J. Gibson of the Geoscience Research Institute says: For many years there has been a general dissatisfaction with the protein hypothesis of the origin of life. Proteins cannot replicate themselves, making them unsuitable as a starting point for the development of life. However, there seemed to be no naturalistic alternative available until recently. This newer hypothesis has been dubbed the “RNA World” (Gilbert 1986). The basis for this model is the discovery that certain RNA molecules have catalytic properties. Since RNA also serves as a carrier of information, it seemed reasonable to suggest that ancient RNA molecules might have acted as a starting point for the origin of life. The “RNA World” hypothesis for the origin of life seems a significant improvement over the protein hypothesis, and has been the subject of considerable discussion.
His article concludes with:
The “RNA World” hypothesis for the origin of life requires implausible events at each step in the sequence outlined. Small molecules are highly unlikely to have been available in any plausible model of a primordial earth. Even if small molecules were present, they would be highly unlikely to produce the large protein and nucleic-acid molecules useful for life. Even if the large molecules were present, there is no known mechanism whereby they might be organized into functional cellular or subcellular units. The “RNA World” hypothesis suffers from many of the same problems as the protein hypothesis, and has additional problems of its own. Considering the conditions necessary for the establishment of life, it appears that the most plausible explanation for the origin of life is an intelligent creator.”