Secular Science Cannot Explain How Life Came From Non-Life

23 May Secular Science Cannot Explain How Life Came From Non-Life

Blog Series

Moving from Checkers to Chess

Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective

This week we’re continuing our series: “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective.” Unless we have an eternal perspective, viewing life as God does, we are playing checkers in life while God is playing chess. And, if that’s the case, two things are certain: (1) we will consistently make the wrong moves, and (2) we lose in the end. I’d like to help avoid that.

Secular scientists and an “anti-supernatural presupposition”

As we saw last week, secular scientists have an anti-supernatural presupposition. That is, they presuppose – ahead of time, before even looking at the evidence – that God cannot be the answer to the major scientific questions of life, and commit themselves to an alternate explanation.

However, in doing so, there are five major issues that they cannot answer, without first being given “five free miracles” as their starting point.

We’ve looked previously in this series at the first two issues they have trouble with when trying to explain “what is” without the existence of God:

1. Secular scientists cannot explain how something came from nothing. 
2. Secular scientists cannot explain how order came from chaos.

Today, we look at their next problem in trying to explain “what is” without the existence of God:

Secular scientists cannot explain how life came from non-life.

The reality is, modern science has no idea how life came from non-life.

The closest modern science can come to explaining the origin of life is an experiment in 1952, the Miller-Urey Experiment, which does not explain the origin of life but to which modern science often looks for the closest guess.

In the Miller-Urey experiment, scientists took four basic substances (water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen) and charged them with an electrical current. The rationale was that those four substances were thought to have covered the earth 4 billion years ago, and because the earth was often struck with lightning then, those two factors might have produced life. And when they did that experiment, it produced some amino acids. As a result, they theorized that this could have been the process which began life on earth.

Scientists who were eager to find a way to explain the origin of life without God were eager to embrace this theory, but there are many fatal flaws with that conclusion:

1. Amino acids are not living things. To create amino acids is not to create life. The amino acids were somehow assumed to magically combine with proteins and other crucial components to morph into living cells. But again, that did not happen in the experiment, and subsequent scientific discoveries make it increasingly improbable that it ever could happen.
2. In the following 70 years, thousands of experiments and millions of dollars have failed to advance the possibility that amino acids could somehow morph into living cells.
3. Newer scientific information reveals that the conditions on the planet Earth at that time, assuming that their assumptions about conditions 4 billion years ago are correct, would have been far from the carefully controlled laboratory conditions of the experiment, and that it is unrealistic to assume that the experiment approximated conditions on earth when life was supposed to have started.
4. Additional scientific discoveries have revealed that a single celled organism, the earliest and simplest form of life according to this theory, is now known to be inconceivably more complex than was thought in 1952.

These four points, when unpacked, pronounce a death knell to the Miller–Urey experiment and any speculations that its findings might possibly have led to spontaneous life without God.

In his book The Cosmic Blueprint, physicist Paul Davies writes, “it is possible to perform rough calculations on the probability that the endless breakup and reforming of complex molecules could lead to a small virus after a billion years. There is one chance in over 10 to the 2 millionth power,” which is statistically harder than flipping a coin and having it come up heads 6 million times in a row.

Davies concludes by saying “the spontaneous generation of life by random molecular shuffling is a ludicrously improbable event.”

But secular scientists are desperate to keep God out of the equation. Award-winning scientists have speculated various wild ideas which have no scientific support whatsoever. Some suggest that if there were an infinite number of universes, then this might be one of them in which it happened by chance. Others scoot farther out on a limb and then saw it off behind them by speculating that aliens brought life to earth. Unfortunately, they never go so far as to explain how alien life forms started from non-life.

 Conclusion

This is only a hint of the avalanche of information against life beginning on earth by chance. In the book In the Beginning There Was… Information, geneticist Michael Denton writes that the tiniest bacterial cell “is in effect a veritable micro miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up of [billions] of atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.”

The bottom line is that if a scientist is absolutely committed to finding a way to explain the origin of life without God, he can pretend to find one, even if he has to resort to aliens. Unbelief never has enough proof. If you will not accept a reasonable answer, you are left with only unreasonable answers.

But I have never understood why anyone would refuse to accept to go where the truth leads. Why would someone decide ahead of time that he will not believe in God, and commit himself to whatever answers are available to him in a world without God?

However, reality remains consistent. Just as, without God, it is impossible to explain how something came from nothing or how order came from chaos, so it is impossible to explain how life came from non-life without God.

Next week, we’ll investigate the fourth issue secular scientists cannot explain without God: how consciousness came from non-consciousness. I look forward to sharing with you then.

In case you’re new here, below are two resources I’ve created for additional help in your Christian discipleship journey:

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