Part Four: WHY EVOLUTION CAN’T EXPLAIN THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
Naturalistic evolution (Darwinism) requires life to have somehow emerged accidentally from non-life to launch random, undirected biological evolution. Is there any empirical evidence for this (i.e. evidence derived from observation or experimentation)? None.
The same indisputable design observed throughout the universe (see last week’s blog) is also found in life on Earth. And just as with the universe, accident and chance operating without purpose or design cannot account for the origin and incredible complexity of life on Earth. Only a supreme intelligence could have organized the raw materials needed for even the simplest living cell to exist—let alone complex organisms.
Nevertheless, Darwinists claim that at least once, some three and a half billion years ago, inorganic (non-living) chemicals in some kind of “prebiotic soup” reacted randomly with sunlight, lightning, or another energy source that allowed self-replicating cells to develop by accident. Called “abiogenesis,” this process supposedly initiated the evolutionary journey of all living things.
Does the scientific evidence support abiogenesis? No. This phenomenon has never been observed in nature. Nor—in spite of numerous attempts—has life been created from non-life in a laboratory. There is no known mechanism explaining how living organisms could have emerged from an alleged chemical soup. In fact, no physical evidence indicates that such a “soup” ever existed.
The real obstacle to life emerging out of non-life, however, is that it is statistically impossible. The earth is not old enough for even the simplest organism to spring out of a primordial soup—even if it did exist. Astrophysicist Hugh Ross provided the necessary figures to illustrate this:
Years ago, molecular biophysicist Harold Morowitz calculated . . . that if one were to take the simplest living cell and break every chemical bond within it, the odds that the cell would reassemble under ideal natural conditions (the best possible chemical environment) would be one chance in 10100,000,000,000. . . . With odds remote as 1 in 10100,000,000,000 the time scale issue becomes completely irrelevant. . . . The size of the universe is of no consequence either. If all the matter in the visible universe were converted into building blocks of life, and if assembly of these building blocks were attempted once a microsecond for the entire age of the universe, then instead of the odds being 1 in 10100,000,000,000 they would be 1 in 1099,999,999,916. (The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God (139-140).
For the less mathematically minded, renowned British mathematician and astronomer, the late Sir Fred Hoyle, offered another illustration to demonstrate the statistical impossibility of life emerging by chance. He described the probability as similar to that of a tornado passing through a junkyard would leave behind a Boeing 747!
In short, no scientific evidence has revealed that inorganic, non-living chemicals ever evolved—or could evolve—into organic life. ©
Next Week: We’ll see why natural selection can’t work in terms of evolving new species of life.