22 Feb Free Miracle #3: Life Came From Non-life
Blog Series
Why Believe in God? ~ If You Reject God, You’ve Only Done Half the Job.
Sorry for the repetition, but for the sake of those who may be reading this blog in our current series for the first time – and to set the context for those of you who have been reading all along…
…to review what we said in a blog post seven weeks ago, ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, in a TED talk said, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we will explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.”
A nervous ripple of laughter spread through the audience when he said that, because it seemed transparently true, though they knew they were not supposed to admit it.
But in reality, it is far worse than that. Modern science is not asking for one free miracle. They are asking for five:
- Something came from nothing.
- Order came from chaos.
- Life came from non-life.
- Consciousness came from non-consciousness.
- Transcendence came from consciousness.
Modern science has no explanation for any of these five things, so for the most part, it simply doesn’t talk about them. They assume these five things somehow happened and try to explain what fills in the gaps between them.
We have already looked at the first two free miracles that they ask for…
- Something came from nothing
- Order came from chaos
We decided we are not going to give them these miracles for free, and in doing so, expose the barrenness of modern secular science, and reinforce the reasonableness of believing in God. Because if you reject God, you have only done half the job. The other half is that you have to explain reality – you have to explain “what is” – without Him. And as the evidence accumulates, we see it cannot be done with credibility.
This week, we look at free miracle #3 that modern science asks for, that life came from non-life.
Free Miracle #3: 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 nonlife.
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 it is impossible to explain how something came from nothing, and how order came from chaos without God, so it is impossible to explain how life came from non-life without God.
Next week, we will investigate the fourth free miracle modern science asks for, how consciousness came from non-consciousness. I look forward to sharing with you then.
In order to avoid overwhelm in presenting this fundamental line of thought, I have simplified and left a lot out. For further study and reading, see:
Is Atheism Dead? By Eric Metaxas
Origins of Life by Hugh Ross
These books are not easy reading, but the information in them is detailed and compelling.
In case you’re new here
This blog post is part of a series titled “Why Believe in God? If You Reject God, You’ve Only Done Half the Job.”, introduced on January 5, 2022. As the series continues, each succeeding post will be added to and available in the blog archives at www.maxanders.com.
If you know anyone who you think might enjoy joining us in this study, please forward this blog to them and encourage them to go to my web site (www.maxanders.com) and sign up for the free video, “Master the Bible So Well That the Bible Masters You”, available there on the home page. This will put them on my regular mailing list and they’ll receive my weekly blogs on this subject.
I look forward to going through this faith-affirming journey with you.
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