"The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747."¹

- Chandra Wickramasinghe

Nor can evolutionism explain the post-Big Bang origin of first life on earth.  Even Darwin ducked the issue, admitting "...Science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life."³

Darwin's "far higher problem" reached out-of-reach of anything he could possibly have imagined.  Nineteenth century evolutionists, lacking access to the electron microscope, discounted the cell as a mere blob of protoplasm.

Twenty-first century molecular biologists have witnessed instead, with their own eyes, a pulsating package of coordinated microscopic motors and machines drive the core of the simplest cell.  "...The tiniest bacteria cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10^-12gms, each is in effect a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built in the non-living world."^1a

Original life didn't appear by random accident.  Inorganic nature never delivered the recipe for "Formula One."  Spontaneous generation cannot provide the essential anchor to Darwin's dreams.  Evolutionism's thesis relies on a "miracle" at its base!  "To get a cell by chance would require at least one hundred functional proteins to appear simultaneously in one place."^1b

Depression era kids built their own toys, chasing impossible dreams.  One seven-year-old let his imagination run wild, hoping that with a bit of luck, he might fashion a radio by gluing a radio dial on a cardboard box and lacing the insides with string.  Older siblings laughed while wise parents smiled knowingly.  Undaunted, the youngster waited days and days for his dream machine to sputter with static. 

Nature didn't oblige!

The sun beat down, the wind blew, and rain pelted the carton Despite the naive wish of a child, the disintegrating contraption never delivered the announcer's mellow, pre-WWII sounds: "You are listening to KFI Los Angeles, Earl C. Anthony Incorporated, California distributor of Packard motor cars."  Products composed of inorganic materials require more than blind chance. 

Evolutionism's recipe for Formula One evades hot pursuit.  By default, it is left to Mother Nature's whims and Pappy Time's ancient ages to accidentally parent life's first cell.

Seven assumptions "...not capable of experimental verification" haunt evolutionism.  At the top of the list is the assumption "...that non-living things gave rise to living material, i.e. spontaneous generation occurred."²

Richard Hutton, Executive Producer of the controversial PBS TV series, "Evolution," was asked, "What are some of the larger questions still unanswered by evolutionary theory?"   He replied: "The origin of life.  There is no consensus at all here---lots of theories, little science.  That's one of the reasons we didn't cover it in the series.  The evidence wasn't very good." (Emphasis added).³

Let's get this straight!

Does this mean spontaneous generation of first life is admittedly unscientific?  If belief in spontaneous generation is not faith, plain and simple, then where's the "science?" It's less than consistent to acknowledge the core anchor of a belief-system as faith-based "assumption" and then to label an hypothesis anchored to that assumption as "science."

Evolutionism postures as science while rejecting the possibility of an Intelligent Designer as faith-based religion.  If evolutionism's foundation dogma constitutes faith-based assumption, how can it wrap itself in science's mantle?

The ultimate issue becomes: "Which faith is rational"?

Robert Jastrow underscored the dilemma.  "...Either life was created on the earth by the will of a being outside the grasp of scientific understanding, or it evolved on the planet spontaneously, through chemical reactions occurring in nonliving matter lying on the surface of the earth.  The first theory...is a statement of faith in the power of a Supreme Being...The second theory is also an act of faith...assuming that the scientific view of the origin of life is correct, without having concrete evidence to support the belief."⁴ 

Spontaneous Generation

The year after Darwin's Origin, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) discarded the medieval superstition that life originated spontaneously.   This is the same French chemist who fathered microbiology and introduced vaccines for anthrax and rabies (Darwin deplored vaccinations). He demonstrated the vacuity of the belief that inorganic matter spontaneously generates life, advocating the Law of Biogenesis: life begets life; like begets like. Like the father of genetics, the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), Pasteur towers above and beyond primitive superstitions, authoring insightful principles yet to be demolished.

No sooner had Pasteur confirmed the Law of Biogenesis, than evolutionism took a toe-hold in the minds of those seeking escape from the Genesis account of an Intelligent Designer authoring life. Pasteur's findings threatened minds reluctant to recognize intelligent design in the origin of life.  The Law of Biogenesis created a crises at naturalism's root.

Darwin acknowledged puzzlement at the "far higher problem" of the origin of first ever life on earth, and intuitively skirted the issue referencing the possibility of life's origin in some "warm little pond."

Successor evolutionists were left to unravel naturalism's nagging first-life dilemma.  Prior to the revelation of DNA's double helix, Alexander I. Oparin, a Russian and British chemist J.H.S. Haldane attempted to rescue the discredited spontaneous generation theory from the dust bin of medieval alchemy, speculating the key was a "reducing" atmosphere.

The Oparin-Haldane "abiogenesis" conjecture proposes that the early earth atmosphere consisted of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water vapor, without oxygen.  These inorganic "...chemicals combined to form organic compounds, such as amino acids, which in turn combined to form large, complex molecules, such as proteins, which aggregated to form an interconnecting network and a cell wall."⁵

Oparin envisioned a twisting trail of happenstance with each step miraculously surviving the "warm little pond's" choking green slime.  He counted on the energy from lightning, earthquakes, heat from volcanoes, and the sun's rays to trigger chemical reactions with atmospheric gases such as methane, ammonia, hydrogen, ethane and water vapors converting them to amino acids, fatty acids and sugars in the oceans.  These compounds then linked up to form larger protein and DNA molecules, ultimately becoming "the first true cell" capable of "metabolism, genetic coding, and the ability to reproduce" when wrapped with a membrane.⁶

One public school text has instructed students that "...primitive earth may have had an atmosphere largely of hydrogen which was later lost to space.  A secondary atmosphere may have included ammonia, methane, water, and hydrogen sulfide...Ultraviolet light from the sun, electrical storms, and decay of radioactive elements may have provided the energy to combine these molecules as sugars and amino acids.  Amino acids could have combined to form proteins..."⁷

Phrases like "may have" and "could have" don't disguise blatant speculation.  Could lightning, heat from volcanoes and the sun's ultraviolet rays have actually "...affected gases in the primitive earth's atmosphere and changed them into more complicated organic compounds..." such as fatty acids, amino acids, sugars, and nucleotides?  Which in turn "accumulated in the ocean and then linked up with each other to form very complex molecules..." such as lipids, peptides, carbohydrates, polynucleotides and eventually combine to form "amazingly complex proteins?"⁸

The spontaneous generation scenario is reminiscent of Wiley Coyote's futile chase of the crafty road runner in epic cartoons starring an over exuberant Wiley racing past the cliff's edge, legs churning wildly, momentarily suspended in space, before gravity takes over sending him crashing to earth. Mark Twain's tongue-in-cheek humor seems apropos. "There is something fascinating about science.  One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."⁹

Realistic evolutionists, aware of the limitations inherent in the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis, look for an alternative explanation for the origin of life other than acknowledging the creative power of God.  Panspermia offers a faint hint of intellectual refuge for some.  The fancy term conjectures that first life perhaps arrived on Earth from outer-space.  But like the squeezed air bubble in a balloon, the dilemma doesn't go away, but only begs the question.

The problem looms threefold. What transport carried life through space? How did life survive mind-boggling ages of travel time through an environment notoriously hostile to life?  Just how did that first life fragment from "outer-space" originate?  The lofty labels, Panspermia and Abiogenesis, conceal thin scientific substance.

Evolutionism requires heavy doses of deep time measured in the billions of years for the alleged transit of life to emerge from a first, so-called "simple" cell, to something more "complex."  The spontaneous generation of that first cell demands a confluence of unlikely coincidences---a split second in a billions-of-years time span;  a fortuitous location no more than a micro-mini speck in the cross-hairs of space; and an accidental congregation life-essential elements focused on that delicate instant of time and place.

A class-five hurricane can scramble and devour telephone lines in its fickle path of raging fury. No one has seen this fearsome force shape the random jumble of metal strewn in its twisted wake to create a TV set or personal computer—much less manufacture self-replicating models!

Accidental creation of an operational TV by a hurricane's random havoc seems less than farfetched compared to the chance of a living cell spawning itself from slimy chaos thanks to spontaneous generation!  "In nature, we have not documented a single case of spontaneous generation/chemical evolution."¹⁰

Who says evolutionists don't subscribe to miracles?

The Cell

A living cell consists of nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen; it  stores an encyclopedia of working knowledge; and it reproduces a copy of itself.  But "life is far more than chemicals, and building life immensely more complex than pasting carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen together in clever ways.  Every coffin in the cemetery is filled with those same chemicals, but no one walks out in the morning."¹¹

Twenty amino acid chains make proteins; they can't order themselves.  Typically there are 500 amino acid chains in a protein.  There are more than 30,000 distinct proteins. The key to proteins folding into three-dimensional shapes is the sequence and arrangement of amino acids. Protein functions are based on their 3-D shapes.¹²  

Proteins do all but store information.  But their assembly requires instruction.  The DNA molecule not only provides the instruction but also stores the information. Proteins can't exist without DNA and DNA can't exist without proteins.  Both are mutually dependant.

So where did the critical information come from?  Certainly not from spontaneous generation.

Ernst Haeckel, nineteenth century German scientist remembered most for his deliberate doctoring of embryo drawings to prove evolutionism, dismissed cells as "globules of plasm" that must have sprung spontaneously from the "warm little pond" envisioned by Darwin.  The electron microscope blew this misdirected vision out of the water (or "soup").

Molecular biology surfaced as serious science decades after Origin of Species raised eyebrows and temperatures.  Investigation of life forms smaller than a print dot at the end of a sentence turned the study of origins on its end.  From focus on fossils, life forms previously unseen and unknown took center stage.  Had molecular evidence been available in Darwin's day, "the idea of organic evolution might never have been accepted."¹³

"Instead of revealing a multitude of transitional forms through which the evolution of the cell might have occurred, molecular biology has served only to emphasize the enormity of the gap.  We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature."¹⁴

Lacking the technological tools common-place to molecular biology, 19^th century analysts underestimated the complexity of this infinitesimal scrap of living matter.  Darwin lacked the first clue that the human body contained as many as 75 trillion cells with "...200 million variations, ranging from microscopic red blood cells to long, skinny nerve cells that stretch from the base of the spine to the foot...Every cell contains an estimated one billion compounds...and among these compounds are five million different kinds of proteins...These compounds are highly variable in shape, size, electrical charge, and configuration; many can complete a function in a millionth of a second."¹⁵

At a minimum, a living cell requires a system of regulatory mechanisms; a constant supply of energy; an abundance of four nitrogenous bases, ribotide phosphates, twenty aminoacyl nucleotidates, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA),  DNA polymerase, and RNA polymerase.¹⁶

A cell must take in food, discard wastes, repair, replace, grow, possess regulatory mechanisms and reproduce---all functioning pursuant to a built-in information code.¹⁷ Even the simplest known cell's genome carries nearly 500 genes. All this wrapped in a functional membrane, a far-fetched candidate to be explained by fortuitous coincidence.

"The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event.  Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle."¹⁸

Michael Denton's research reveals that the simplest cell, throbs with life far more complex in structure and function than any mechanism yet conceived by humans. "To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is 20 kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York.

"What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast spaceship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity...

"The simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about 3,000 atoms...What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense automated factory...larger than any city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth...a factory which would have one capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours."¹⁹

"The tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-¹² gms; each is in effect a microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man...The

size, structure, and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all living cells...no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth."²⁰  

Prebiotic Soup

The "warm little pond" scenario posits the action of energy sources forming organic compounds in the atmosphere "...which were washed down by rain and accumulated in the primitive oceans until they reached the consistency of a hot dilute soup.  According to this model, life appeared from the chemical reactions and transformations that took place in this prebiotic soup."²¹

Evidence of the imaginary hot green pond doesn't exist!  In effect, Darwin's biological evolution hypothesis lacks an air base for its take-off. "...Prebiotic chemical soup, presumably a worldwide phenomenon, left no known trace in the geological record."²²

The "dawn rocks" from Western Greenland, conventionally dated at 3.9 billion years old and reputedly the oldest known dated rocks on the planet, contain no "trace of abiotically produced compounds...Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence."²³

Hubert Yockey dismisses the Oparin-Haldane "prebiotic soup" as something that never existed.  "The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual motion machine is impossible in probability."²⁴

Abiogenesis didn't happen but should be viewed as "just a relic of the cosmology of the time it was invented...There is no evidence that a ‘hot dilute soup' ever existed.  In spite of this fact, adherents of this paradigm think it ought to have existed for philosophical or ideological reasons...

"...Scientists are divided into segregated schools that do not even agree on the standards of scientific inquiry..." With respect to the "prebiotic soup theory of the origin of life...objective scientific principle of a search for the truth is replaced by the subjective aesthetic principle of a well-constructed story."²⁵

"...In science one must follow the results of experiments and mathematics and not one's faith, religion, philosophy or ideology.  The primeval soup is unobservable since, by the paradigm it was destroyed by the organisms from which it presumably emerged."²⁶

Biochemist Michael Behe, working with an assistant in the NIH lab "...analyzed the supposed miracle of the first living cell coming into being by historical accident.  ‘What would you need?' they asked each other.  ‘You need a membrane, a power supply, and you need some genetic information.  You need a replication system.  And we kind of stopped and looked at each other.  We said, ‘Nah.'"²⁷

Miller-Urey Synthesis

You'd think that confronting the mystery of Formula One, human minds equipped with state-of-the-art laboratory tools, could theoretically design and create a cell if nature could do it in a "warm little pond" by random chance.

No such luck!

Most amino acids, the building blocks of cell proteins, have been synthesized in laboratory environments created by humans.  But building a full range of complex proteins from amino acids is an unfulfilled dream---to say nothing of enzymes, DNA, and RNA.  Laboratory replication of a single cell from scratch, life from non-life, more complex than any mechanism humans have yet devised, complete with a full code of genes, continues to elude. No human intelligence at work has yet duplicated what spontaneous generation allegedly accomplished, by accident, in "prebiotic soup."

Stanley Miller and Harold Urey introduced human intelligence to the equation in a 1953 quest to verify the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis.  Inadvertently, intrusion of human intelligence in the design process, the very essence of replicating spontaneous generation by chance was defeated before the first test tube was put on the table.

The Miller-Urey experiment faced "...withering criticism from chemists for ignoring the role of competing and destructive cross-reactions with chemical ions that would be expected in any hypothetical ocean or pond.  These reactions would have tied up or terminated any growing polymer-chain."²⁸

The team attempted to replicate a reducing atmosphere by circulating a high energy spark through methane, ammonia, and hydrogen gases and a circulating hot water vapor.  The experiment produced "a small mass of black tar" along with "a condensed red liquid" containing some amino acids.  The experiment "...only works as long as oxygen is absent and certain critical ratios of hydrogen and carbon dioxide are maintained..." Subsequent experiments using ultraviolet radiation produced "nineteen of the twenty biological amino acids and five nucleic acid bases of DNA and RNA."²⁹

"Urey and Miller assumed that methane was plentiful in the early earth's conditions.  If this is true, the sun's ultraviolet light would have caused hydrocarbons to form and absorb in the clay at the bottom of the ocean.  The deposits from Precambrian periods should then contain significant hydrocarbons or remains of carbons, as well as some nitrogen containing compounds.  None of these are present in these deposits."³⁰

Overeager celebrants initially interpreted the experiment's result as a break-through in creating virtual life from non-life in a test tube.  Realists recognized much less.  Miller and Urey did not create life; nor did they demonstrate that life could have originated spontaneously from inorganic matter. Certainly, amino acids are essential building blocks for cell proteins. But the enigma of the cell challenges.   Scientists can't synthesize life from inert non-life, nor explain the how, when and where Formula One originated.

As for critical genetic information, "DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecules, which are composed of complex arrays of amino acids and are the templates for all living organisms, have yet to be artificially created."³¹ "...The chemical reactions required to form proteins and DNA do not occur readily.  In fact, these products haven't appeared in any simulation experiment to date."³²

At its best, spontaneous generation is an exercise in faith.  Nobel Prize winner, George Wald, shrugged off the obvious, endorsing a miracle of the abstract.  Conceding that "...spontaneous generation of a living thing is impossible," he affirmed his commitment to the hypothesis, acknowledging, "Yet here we are---as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation."³³

"...Scientists employing the full power of their intelligence cannot manufacture living organisms from amino acids, sugars and the like.  How then was the trick done before scientific intelligence was in existence?"³⁴

Spontaneous generation consists of unproved conjecture yet to be achieved either in nature, by chance, or in the laboratory, guided by intelligence. It has never happened—ever!  Not in four millenniums of recorded history. Several billion years is not enough time to override impossible odds.

1---Chandra Wickramasinghe "Threats on Life of Controversial Astronomer," New Scientist, January 21, 1982, p. 140, as quoted by Overman, p. 60.

1a---Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 250.

1b---Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 323.

2---G.A. Kerkut, Implications of Evolution (New York: Pergamon Press, 1965), pp. 6, 7. 

3---Richard Hutton, "Evolution: The Series," Washington Post.com, Live Online,  Wednesday, September 28, 2001.

4---Robert Jastrow, Until the Sun Dies (New York, W.W. Norton, 1977) pp. 62, 63, as quoted by Bert Thompson, The Scientific Case for Creation, p. 76.

5---Percival Davis, Dean H. Kenyon, and Charles B. Thaxton, Academic Editor, Of Pandas and People (Dallas: Haughton Publishing Company, 1993), p. 2.

6---Percival Davis, Dean H. Kenyon, and Charles B. Thaxton, Academic Editor, Of Pandas and People (Dallas: Haughton Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 2, 3. 

7---Percival Davis, Dean H. Kenyon, and Charles B. Thaxton, Academic Editor, Of Pandas and People (Dallas: Haughton Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 2, 3. 

8---Ashby L. Camp, The Myth of Natural Origins (Tempe, Arizona: Ktisisa Publishing, 1994) pp. 31, 32.

9---Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1883), p. 156 as quoted by Brad Harrub, Reason and Revelation, May, 2001, 21(5):38. 

10---Bert Thompson, The Scientific Case for Creation (Montgomery, Alabama: Apologetics Press, 2002) p. 83.

11---Duane Arthur Schmidt, And God Created Darwin (Fairfax, Virginia: Allegiance Press, 2001), pp. 24, 25.

12---Illustra Video's 2002 production, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, introduces the awesome complexity of the cell.  

13---Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, Maryland: Adler & Adler, Publishers, Inc., 1986)  p. 291.

14---Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 249.

15---Geoffrey Simmons, M.D., What Darwin Didn't Know (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 2004) pp. 43, 53.

16---Joshua Lederberg, "A View of Genetics," Science 131 (3396) 1960: pp. 269-280 cited by Harold Coffin, Origin by Design, p. 377, 378.  

17---Harold Coffin, Origin by Design (Hagerstown, Maryland: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1983) p. 379.

18---Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 264.

19---Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 328, 329.

20---Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 250.

21---Dean L. Overman, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997)  p. 38. See Aleksander I. Oparin, The Origin of Life (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1938.

22---Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley and Roger L. Olsen, The Mystery of Life's Origin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1984) pp. 182, 183, 185, quoted by Thompson, p. 80.

23---Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,  p. 261.   

24---Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 257.

25---Gunter Wachtershauser, Letter to Editor, Science, 25 October 2002, vol. 298. 

26---Larry A. Witham, Where Darwin Meets the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 129.

27---Thomas Woodward, Doubts About Darwin (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003) p. 44..  Woodward referenced Sydney Fox in his review of Mystery of Life's Origins in Quarterly Review of Biology, June, 1985. 

28---Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 235, 236, 238, and 335 as quoted by Overman, p. 48.

29---Dean L. Overman, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization, pp. 40, 41.   

30---Dean L. Overman, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization,  pp. 45, 46.

31---Kirk R. Johnson and Richard K. Stucky, Prehistoric Journey (Boulder, Colorado: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1995) p. 16.  

32---Percival Davis, Dean H. Kenyon, and Charles B. Thaxton, Academic Editor, Of Pandas and People (Dallas: Haughton Publishing Company, 1993), p. 3.

33---George Wald, "The Origin of Life," Sci. Am., August, 1954, 191(2):44-53, cited by Coffin, pp. 376, 377.

34---Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991) p. 103.

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