Abiogenesis - or more appropriately - Its Time to Stop Pretending

 

In recent posts I have attempted to highlight what I believe to be the “purposeful vagueness” that the Lord used when He gave the testimony of how He formed the world to mankind in Genesis 1 and 2¹. By using the mysterious phrase “Let the earth bring forth” to explain the mechanics for the creation of plants, animals and people He allowed us to embrace multiple possible scientific systems without having to surrender our conviction of the authority and inerrancy of the Bible. By using the word “day” before the earth and the sun come into their final relational positions with each other He allowed us to disassociate our understanding of a “day” in the reading of these chapters as being defined by the earth’s rotation on its axis at it relates to the sun to instead be some block of time that we are unable to relate to in regards to how we would experience a “day” on earth. 

I truly believe this to be the wisdom of God to give His people the intellectual space to explore and even embrace any number of explanations for the world as we know it today. One could believe the universe is 13.8 billion earth-years old and that plants and animals evolved or that the universe is 6 thousand earth-years old and that living things were created in a special/supernatural way but both sides still be in agreement that the universe was created in 6 God-Days and that regardless of the way that He did it that it was in fact God who created all life. 

Knowing the age of the earth or the method God used as He created everything is something that I think Scripture leaves open and as such is a subject that is free to be explored by the believer.  This enables me to embrace fellowship with a brother/sister who holds a different perspective than I do as long as we both agree that no matter how long it took Him to do it or by what means He went about doing it that God was the one who not only made the world and animals but that He made people distinctly in His Image. 

That being said I do have my opinions about the scientific theories that are popular today. I have spoken about why I don’t think that natural selection working on random mutations  fits the objective data. But even though I don’t believe in evolution I’m still fascinated with the attempts of scientists to explain the origin of life in a naturalistic way because I believe that Scripture doesn’t close the door on God using a material cause as His mechanism for the creation of plants, animals and people.  I previously gave my critique on Darwinism as it is understood on its own terms – which is the attempt to explain the progression of life from the First Cell until our current day - but in this post I want to focus in on Abiogenesis, a yet-undiscovered process that atheistic materialists say precedes evolution.  And yet a concept that at the same time stirs the heart of the God-fearing seeker of truth to a place of wonder, pondering how it is that the Lord² brought forth the first living creature.

Speculating about the First Cell 

Abiogenesis³ is the idea that in the distant past when the earth consisted only of non-living raw materials that something happened to cause lifeless substances to come together in such a way as to produce the First Living Cell.  Proponents of this theory see it possibly taking place in the earth’s oceans where either by chemical reaction or via the means of some kind of catalyst (for example lightning) the inanimate substances that were floating around in the pre-historic waters combined with one another so as to result in a living organism.

I find this concept fascinating because there are 2 facts that I think we need to grapple with when considering all living things:

1)      God made them

2)      They are all carbon-based life forms made up of cells

And the question I think these 2 facts beget is this – how did God take the raw materials that He provided in the universe in Genesis 1:1 (at the Big Bang) and use them as the building blocks for living things?

This question is fascinating and one that I pray inspires a new generation of God-fearing scientists to seek to understand the mystery of living things in an attempt to piece together the method that God used in giving them their material bodies.  Admittedly this may be a question that is beyond the scope of discovery in this age because the earth has been cursed (Romans 8:20-21) and God may have enacted in it a material process that is no longer in action today.  It is also just as possible that God did this supernaturally and formed the first living creature along with the rest of the plants and animals in a way that could never have been duplicated by a natural process⁴.

But irregardless it is still a valuable endeavor to seek to understand the process that God used when He made us as this may be one of those hidden mysteries that He has concealed for our glory.  Proverbs 25:2 says that it is the “glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings to search the matter out” and it very well may be that future generations of Christian scientists may find the method God used to build living things out of the lifeless raw materials He had created on the First Day.

But while I think this is a worthy pursuit it is important to note that this is in fact a pursuit of something we don’t currently know.  That’s an important thing to point out because you wouldn’t know that based on the way many atheistic evolutionists talk.  I recently read a series of articles by Neil Thomas that illustrated this showing that the writers of popular scientific notions are often guilty of using words that make an idea that is entirely based on speculation appear to have scientific basis. In this intellectual slight-of-hand elaborate words and tenured titles replace experiment-based evidence.  And in no place is this more apparent than with the concept of Abiogenesis.  If you look at a dictionary you will see Abiogenesis being defined as “Chemical evolution”.  Doesn’t the word “Abiogenesis” sound like it has a complex set of premises to explain it?  Or maybe the phrase “chemical evolution”.  Doesn’t that seem to invoke some kind of scientific process?  But when broken down one realizes how empty these words really are.  If Abiogenesis is in fact defined as being “chemical evolution” then what is “chemical evolution”?  Or more importantly how can chemicals, which are non-living substances, evolve?  If evolution requires speciation/random mutations that are passed down via reproduction then how could chemicals, that don’t reproduce themselves, mutate?  Is not the phrase “chemical evolution” an oxymoron?

I think in our day we have become accustomed to this by the theory of evolution because we are told that the time it takes for evolutionary change to occur is so large that the chances that we would see one take place in our day are very small.  As such a lab-based demonstration of Darwinism is not required and instead appeals to the imagination are made as we are led to speculate what could take place over large periods of time.  And while I can see that if natural selection working on random mutations was in fact going to work that it would take large amounts of time to be able to do so subsequently making it impossible to recreate by the scientific method; I at the same time reject that this same immunity should be given to the theory of Abiogenesis.  I say this because there are 2 parts of Abiogenesis that need to be confirmed.

1)      What were the non-living chemicals that were present on earth before the first cell?

2)      How did those lifeless substances come together in such a way as to produce life?

The first question is an important one but whether that is able to be answered or not the second question is actually more important.  How do we take lifeless things and combine them to create a living cell? 

It's Time to Stop Pretending

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of chemicals combining to produce a living cell is an understanding of how mind-boggling complex the cell really is.  Eric Metaxas does a good job of putting the difficulty of this into focus by explaining that in the “most elementary type of cell constitutes a ‘mechanism’ unimaginably more complex than any machine yet thought up, let alone constructed by man.  Exactly how complex is hard to comprehend.  The information in the DNA of a single bacterium alone is equivalent to the millions of words in a shelf of twenty books.  The building blocks of DNA and RNA are called nucleotides, which are each involved in signaling, metabolism, and enzyme reactions.  Each nucleotide consists of three parts: a phosphate group, a five-carbon sugar and a nitrogenous base.  The smallest bacterium in existence has 5,375 nucleotides.  Other bacteria have three million.  So how can we really comprehend the complexity of even the simplest cell, which we once thought simply to be a membrane surrounding some jelly-like ‘protoplasm’?  And how is it exactly that these endless numbers of nucleotides are themselves ‘programmed’ to do the complex things they do?  We know that they are somehow ‘programmed’ – but how?  And can we dare to imagine that cells of such inestimable complexity just happened to show up through random sloshing of waters on the surface of the early Earth?  Because that is precisely what has been continuously proposed over the decades⁵.”

Some actually have undertaken the exercise of figuring the odds of something this complex actually happening.  Metaxas quotes one such individual, Paul Davies, who says that it is “possible to perform rough calculations of the probability that the endless breakup and reforming of the soup’s complex molecules would lead to a small virus after a billion years.”  He says the calculation of this occurring would be “one chance in over 10 to the two millionth power.”  That’s two million zeros!  He states that it is more likely for someone to flip “heads on a coin six million times in a row⁶.” He goes on to obviously conclude that “the spontaneous generation of life by random molecular shuffling is a ludicrously improbable event.”

But even if we were that lucky so that something so immensely improbable happened, we still are not able to re-create it ourselves. This is big problem because if we are stating that something can happen spontaneously then we are assigning it to a category that can be verified by tests and re-created in a lab.  Metaxas goes into this by quoting renowned nano-scientist James Tour who states that:

“First of all, we don’t know how to build…the four classes of molecules that are needed for [life. And even] if we had those four classes of molecules, we don’t know how to assemble them even into the simplest of bacterium.  We don’t know how to do that… Anyone who would say something contrary does not know what they are talking about.  Show me the demonstration.  Nobody has ever done it and it’s not because of a lack of effort; it’s not because of a lack of will.  First of all they haven’t been able to get the molecules to do this and if they could make the molecules – even if we were to give them the molecules – they wouldn’t have the information.  There would be no inherent information in the DNA.  But even if we gave them the DNA in the structure that they wanted, they wouldn’t know how to put all the components together because of the sophistication within a cell.  The interactomes – meaning the interacting connectivity between the molecules, the Van der Waals interactions – all of these have to be in the right place and in the right order for a cell to function.  We don’t even know how to define life, let alone how to spark it to begin.”

Dr. Tour goes on to say that the normal explanation given for material processes that we can’t replicate – which is that they took an astronomically long amount of time to accomplish – doesn’t apply here.  Tour explains that “time can be the enemy when it comes to organic synthesis.  Many of the chemicals needed are kinetic products, meaning they are not thermodynamically stable.  For example, carbohydrates—the main class of compounds—are the units that hook together DNA.  These are the units that have identifying aspects on cell structure; these are the units that the cell is going to need for the energy of life.  But once they form they begin to decompose.  Tour says, ‘Unless somebody is there…to fish them out, to stop the process, and put them in a bottle under inert conditions in a freezer,’ they go away as quickly as they came into being.

Tour explains there are many other similar problems.  For example, if random processes somehow succeeded in miraculously creating a carbohydrate or another necessary compound, the random processes don’t know how to do it again.  They have no capacity to ‘learn’.  If they happen to hit it just right by accident, they have no ability to say ‘Let’s try that again!’  Tour says, ‘Say it took you four hundred million years to get to a certain point on a synthesis, [but] now you have to go back and make more.  But how do you go back and make more?  Nature never kept a laboratory notebook….So even if it could make more, it doesn’t know how to , so it’s got to start all over again.  But it doesn’t know how to. [It] doesn’t know why to start over again because it doesn’t know what it’s going toward.”

Metaxas summarizes Tour’s synopsis by saying, “in other words, we now know that because there is zero intentionality in random processes happening over time, the assumptions we have made aren’t reasonable.  In fact they are fanciful and wildly unrealistic, but they suited the narrative that these things happened without a divine hand guiding them.  But Tour has no qualms about saying that the science is now very clear that this cannot have been what happened.  And its time to stop pretending⁷.”

As such in my mind scientists have not provided for us a viable means to explain the origin of life.  And maybe its time to embrace the fact that at this point we just don’t know how life happened.  Maybe its ok to admit that we just don’t understand this from a material perspective.  And maybe its time, as I quoted Metaxas earlier, to stop pretending that we do.

 

 

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¹ It could be either Adam or Moses who He gave this to.  He could told Moses this while he was on the mountain.

² I hope in my writing of these posts that I have established that God worded the first 2 chapters of Genesis in such a way as to allow us to embrace scientific theories that are put forth by individuals who do not believe in Him.  We can embrace Abiogenesis as being the method that God used to build carbon-based life.  We also can reject Abiogenesis if we don’t see it as a viable explanation.  The space given by the Lord to the believer allows him to either embrace or reject different approaches to science allows us to review the ideas as they are proposed then either accept or reject them based on how good of explanations that we think they are.

³ Aristotle called this “Spontaneous Generation”

⁴ For an explanation of this see “The Lost Glory of the Earth” post.

⁵ Is Atheism Dead Chapter 7

⁶ Is Atheism Dead Chapter 7

⁷ Is Atheism Dead Chapter 7 – All of the parts where I quote Metaxas on this come from the book “Is Atheism Dead?