First Life Must Have Had An Intelligent Cause

Chemical evolution, the origin of living matter from non-living matter, will be addressed next. It will be shown that the naturalistic view of the origin of first life is also unsatisfactory.

There Are Just Two Options, Really

There aren‘t many options when it comes to the origin of first life. In fact, there are two:
(1) life spontaneously appeared on its own through chemical reactions in non-living matter and then continued to evolve through naturalistic processes, or
(2) life is the result of an intelligent cause. Noble Prize-winning biologist George Wald said, There is no third position.

Spontaneous Generation

The popular view in chemical evolution is called spontaneous generation. This view asserts that conditions on early earth allowed the formation of amino acids which developed into DNA and ultimately complex cells. This process is believed to have occurred over four billion years ago and was aided by the sun, volcanic activity and other purely naturalistic processes.

The Miller–Urey Experiment

Experiments have been conducted to try to prove spontaneous generation. Most notably was the famous experiment conducted by Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey in 1953 which attempted to show that given the proper amount of chemicals, heat and electricity, life could eventually arise on its own in a sealed environment.

However, this is an example of investigation interference. The chemicals they used to simulate the primordial soup didn‘t exist in the supplied concentrations, but they were intelligently chosen produce the desired reactions. They withheld oxygen from the experiment since no oxygen can be present for the experiment to work, yet many evolutionists believe some amount of oxygen must have been present in the early earth‘s atmosphere for life to have evolved. They ignored that the very means of producing life (radiation) would also destroy it. They had a mechanism to collect only the amino acids that were produced. No wonder British mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe, considered to be one of Britain‘s most eminent scientists, called these types of experiments cheating!

Even if one were to consider these types of experiments valid, the only things that are produced are amino acids, which are considered to be the building blocks of life. No experiment to date has proven life can be generated from non-living matter. On the contrary, it has been disproven (see next).

Problems with Spontaneous Generation

There are three critical problems with the theory of spontaneous generation.

First, it was disproven. It was once widely believed that living things could originate from nonliving matter. But this was proven false by Francesco Redi and Louis Pasteur.

Although Francesco Redi, an Italian physician, disproved in 1668 that higher forms of life could originate spontaneously, proponents of the concept claimed that microbes were different and did indeed arise in this way… in 1864… in a series of masterful experiments, Pasteur proved that only preexisting microbes could give rise to other microbes (biogenesis).

Pasteur later commented on the results:

Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment. No, there is now no circumstance known in which it can be affirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves. Those who affirm it have been duped by illusions, by ill-conducted experiments, spoilt by errors that they either did not perceive or did not know how to avoid.

Second, ―No evidence exists that such a soup ever existed.

If there ever was a primitive soup, then we would expect to find at least somewhere on this planet either massive sediments containing enormous amounts of the various nitrogenous organic compounds, amino acids, purines, pyrimidines and the like, or alternatively in much metamorphosed sediments we should find vast amounts of nitrogenous cokes. In fact no such materials have been found anywhere on earth… There is, in other words, pretty good negative evidence that there ever was a primitive organic soup on this planet that could have lasted but a brief moment.

Third, life would likely be older than the earth itself under the evolutionary model. A recent paper published by evolutionary geneticists suggests life could be 2.7 times older than earth itself! It‘s argued that the complexity of life has increased exponentially, doubling every 376 million years. Extrapolating this rate backwards in time, they conclude that life began before the earth was born, possibly very shortly after the Big Bang:

Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago. Adjustments for potential hyperexponential effects would push the projected origin of life even further back in time, close to the origin of our galaxy and the universe itself, 13.75 billion years ago

Other conclusions are
(1) it took roughly 5 billion years for life to reach the complexity of bacteria,
(2) there was no intelligent life in the universe prior to earth,
(3) life was brought to earth by meteoroids, asteroids or comets,
(4) intelligent life has just begun to appear in our universe and is not as evenly distributed as the Drake equation suggests and
(5) it took many cumulative rare events for life to originate from scratch.

How is it that life arose outside our solar system, possibly very shortly after the Big Bang, in far worse conditions, travelled and survived a very lengthy interstellar space voyage, entered our atmosphere unharmed, found an environment conducive for evolution, and produced the myriad of life forms we see today? Those are many cumulative rare events indeed!

With so many complications, it‘s no surprise that there is no firmly accepted standard model for the emergence and early evolution of life on Earth. In 2011, the Origins Project gathered together two dozen evolutionary scientists at Arizona State University for an update on how first life began. One Scientific American blogger summarized the event this way:

Geologists, chemists, astronomers and biologists are as stumped as ever by the riddle of life.

Spontaneous generation has been disproven, there is no evidence for it, and scientists are at a loss to explain it. Since there really is no other explanation other than an intelligent cause, it would seem that this is currently the only possible explanation. This is the second strike against evolution.

Taken from:

Proof Evolution Is False by Shawn Nelson

© 2014 by Shawn Nelson