CAN LIFE ORIGINATE WITHOUT A DESIGNER?

Origin of life…’Science is working on it……’ 

The biological evidence shows that not even one strand of protein, let alone a mythical ‘simple’ cell, can originate by undesigned naturalistic processes.

Don’t take my word for this, check the facts.

How life began-whether by accident or on purpose- affects your origin and therefore your destiny. Its not trivial, so don’t be bamboozled. You are responsible for what you chose to believe about who you are, where you came from and where you are going.

The famous Miller Urey experiments set out to show that the building blocks of life (amino acids) could have formed naturally in a supposed early earth atmosphere, leading to the origin of life without intelligent intervention. These ‘life in a test tube’ experiments are taught at schools and colleges to this day as ‘proof’ of life coming from non-life without intelligence or engineering input. Of course, it was assumed, and I was taught as fact at A level biology class, that once the amino acids formed, every other stage in the emergence of life from non life though to humanity and beyond would naturally follow. This is still assumed, although not often talked about since no significant progress has been made since the dead end of Miller/Urey. In fact they never got further than making a lot of poisonous sludge and a very few inadequate and unsuitable amino acids.

Miller-Urey is an icon of evolution, but if we look at what the experiments actually showed, if we go with the science facts rather than the spin, it’s a very different story. There follows a brief outline of why these ‘Icon of evolution’ experiments in fact prove the opposite of what they are claimed to prove. Please check the facts independently, for example this YouTube animation about protein synthesis. Or just put ‘protein synthesis’ into the YouTube search bar. Your mission, should you dare to accept it, is to cxheck the sceince facts about undesigned origin of life scenarios and see how they stack up against repeatable science, the proper science that goes on in laboratories and measured things as opposed to philosophically motivated speculations masquerading as science.

Based on ideas from the atheistic Russian scientist Oparin, Miller and his student Urey set up a series of experiments at the University of Chicago in 1953. The experiments involved filling a sealed glass apparatus with the materials that Oparin thought could form life (methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water) then kept it boiling while passing high voltage electrical sparks through it. It was asserted that this was a fair representation of the atmosphere in the early oceans of earth, although whether this was true is open to serious doubt. It seems more likely that the mix of chemicals and the method were chosen as being the most likely to yield the hoped for result. When their first results yielded poisonous sludge but no amino acids, they arranged a cold condenser trap to prevent any ‘origin of life’ chemicals formed being destroyed by heat and sparks.

Entropy breaks things down

A huge problem for the concept of origin-of-life molecules being formed by random energy is that any molecules formed this way would be broken down just as quickly as they were made, since this kind of chemical reaction goes both ways. In living cells, catalysts (*) and protein templates make sure the reaction only goes the right way, like a sort of valve. Amino acids are made efficiently to order under precise DNA/RNA instructions and linked to other amino acids as soon as they are made. This could not have happened in the supposed pre-biotic earth as neither the assembly mechanisms not the information blueprint could have been available.

(*) A catalyst is a chemical, typically in this context a specific protein or complex of proteins, that facilitates a chemical reaction but is not consumed by it. They are vital to most biochemical processes.

Hence the introduction of the ‘cold trap’ to push the results towards what was wanted to support evolution. Any such naturally occurring cold trap arrangement would be extremely implausible on an oceanic scale. Any oxygen in the early earth atmosphere would have destroyed the free amino acids quickly by oxidisation, so there cannot have been any oxygen. Miller and Urey knew this and worked on a no-oxygen (reducing) atmosphere assumption. Having said that, if there were no oxygen in the supposed early earth atmosphere, and without plants there can’t have been, there could have been no ozone. Ozone is a form of oxygen, O3, which forms a protective layer around the earth’s atmosphere, blocking much of the harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation). Without a protective ozone layer, destructive UV radiation from the sun would have poured in and most likely destroyed any supposed early life molecules. Regrettably for materialist origin of life theorists, the presence or absence of oxygen in the supposed early earth atmosphere is very much a heads you lose, tails you lose situation.

Origin of Species?

Of course we know Darwin himself said nothing in ‘Origin of Species’ about how life got started. He commented in a letter to Huxley about it perhaps happening in ‘a warm little pond’. The most obvious deduction from his silence is that he hadn’t the foggiest idea. Fair enough, in those days the science of biochemistry as we know it today didn’t exist and they thought cells were just blobs of protoplasm. Today we know that cells are packed with the most complex machinery imaginable, in fact some of it is mind bogglingly complicated. Biochemistry professor Michael Behe has explained in his books ‘Darwin’s Black Box’ and ‘The Edge of Evolution’something ofhow complicated each of the many hundreds of essential biochemical pathways are, how each depends on all the others, and how they cannot have developed by the means proposed (but never observed) by Darwinians.

The subject of the origin of life cannot honestly be avoided. To say, as many do, that the origin of life is irrelevant to evolution is like saying that sperm is irrelevant to the development of a child in the womb and its birth. Yes, sperm plays no ongoing role in the pregnancy, but nothing else can happen without it being present at the beginning. You can’t have pregnancy without sperm and you can’t have Darwinian Natural Selection until there is something alive to select.

Clearly the Miller Urey experiment was set up in such a way as to make it as easy as possible to make any origin-of-life chemicals, so to that extent there was some ‘intelligent design’ involved. It didn’t help much.

There were initially no amino acids or other ‘building blocks of life’ compounds. After weeks of modifications to the experiments in an attempt to get the desired results (intelligent design and purpose again), traces of 3 of the simplest amino acids were found, mainly glycine and alanine. It is true that repeats of the experiment with more sophisticated analysis showed small quantities of several other amino acids, but way less than the 20 needed. Most importantly, they were present in equal amounts of the laevo and dextro isomers (right and left handed versions of the same chemical). This is an extremely important science point. This mixture of dextro and laevo isomers cannotmake viable proteins. In life only laevo (left handed) amino acids are produced (and millions of times more efficiently that in this experiment). Only laevo amino acids make working proteins. Furthermore, 20 specific amino acids are needed to make proteins. So the proposed ‘origin of life’ experiment meets a solid brick wall right there. But it gets much, much worse.

Peptide bonds

To make a protein, amino acids don’t just stick together like magnets. They are attached by peptide bonds in a process that is controlled to a very precise degree by intracellular nanomachinery. The chemical reactions that make a peptide bond only occur in the highly specialised context of a living cell. Amino acids would not form peptide bonds in a pre-biotic soup as the cellular machinery than normally does this would be absent. Molecular templates, enzymes, and the ADP/ATP energy system, (an incredibly complicated piece of kit-look it up), plus Krebs cycle to process the necessary energy (again, look up Krebs cycle on line, note it’s spelled Krebs, not Kreb’s) are only found in living cells. And then the DNA instructions have to be just right.

And then you need the rest of the cell, for example the cell wall. How indispensible is the cell wall? It keeps the cell’s contents together and stops them drifting apart, and its not a simple barrier either but has several complex functions. Antibiotics kill bacterial cells by disrupting the cell wall. A fully functioning cell wall is indispensible from the start. And this all happened by loose molecules just bumping into each other by accident?

Nobody has ever seen any of this happen, it is supposition and blind faith all the way.

Multiple biochemical road blocks to undesigned origin of protein

The road blocks to evolution as shown by these experiments can be summarised as follows. Please note, at this stage I am only considering the science facts that stand in the way of even a single strand of functional protein being formed. There are very many further steps that must be made from that point to our first living cell, but as I will show by  scientific argument there are many insuperable difficulties that undesigned origin of life speculation must overcome before getting even as far as a single molecule of protein, let alone functional protein.

1) PRESENCE/ABSENCE OF OXYGEN Any proposed early earth atmosphere must have been either oxidising (with oxygen, which in its free state is highly reactive-for example, it rusts iron. Rust is iron oxide) or reducing (no oxygen). An oxidising atmosphere would have destroyed any ‘origin of life’ chemicals as soon as they begun. Nobody disputes this, which is why Miller and Urey set their experiment up in a reducing atmosphere as they knew there was no chance of getting the results they hoped for in the presence of free oxygen. However, in a reducing (no oxygen) atmosphere, there would have been no ozone, which as we know from current concerns about holes in the ozone layer would have led to a greatly increased level of ultraviolet light bathing the oceans and the dry land. This would have destroyed the early ‘origin of life’ chemicals too. Road block.

2) ENTROPY Any chemicals formed in the early seas or even Darwin’s speculative ‘warm little pond’ would have drifted apart according to the law of entropy and become too diluted in the ocean to have interacted with one another. Road block.

3) HEAT DESTRUCTION Lets be very generous and discount the above difficulties, and suppose the fabled ‘pre-biotic soup’ plus lightning formed amino acids from water, methane and ammonia plus a few other chemicals volcanoes had belched out. Miller Urey did produce some amino acids. Unfortunately since they were being formed by a crude process which had none of the enzymes and other protein building nanomachinery found in all living cells, the amino acids broke down as soon as they formed. Crude-and unpredictable- heat energy is much more likely to break down complex molecules than build them. That’s  not creationist obfuscation but very fundamental physics. To get round this problem of chemical entropy, they used intelligent design. Miller and Urey introduced a cold trap where the chemicals, once formed, could chill out away from crude energy and heat. But there is no way to do this on a practical scale in the supposed pre-biotic primal soup. Another road block.

4) INSUFFICIENT COMPLEMENT OF AMINO ACIDS The small amount of amino acid produced initially were mostly just the 2 simplest amino acids and minute traces of 7 others. But you need all 20 to make a protein. Road block number 4. I will generously allow that it is possible to imagine conditions in which all 20 amino acids might be formed, or even that it is possible to imagine life forms using fewer than 20 amino acids. However, it is also possible to imagine life on Mars, faster than light hyperspace travel, alternative universes or a flying horse. Isn’t science supposed to be about what we can observe, not what we can imagine? There is no functioning protein known to science which could have been made from these substandard ingredients even if all the other conditions for building a protein had been present.

5) LAEVO/DEXTRO MIXTURE. In living things, only left handed (laevo) amino acids are produced, as only this kind make functional proteins. In the experiments, there was a ‘racemic’ mixture of equal proportions of right and left handed forms of amino acids. This inevitably happens when amino acids are formed by unguided processes. The atoms that make up these different forms are the same, but they are left and right handed (just look at your own hands to get the picture, your right and left hands have the same components but are a mirror image rather than a replica of each other).

Proteins made from a racemic mixture of amino acids like this don’t fold properly. The way that proteins fold is integral to their function, as proteins’ function depends on their shape, which depends on their correct sequence of the correct laevo isomer of amino acids. These proteins would be totally non-functional. This is COMPLETELY FATAL to the idea that amino acids formed themselves in the seas and then made functional proteins by an unguided process. The problem of cheirality (literally ‘handedness’) is another impassable barrier for an undesigned origin of life scenario. The only answers I have heard to this obnjection is that possibly in the distant unobservable past there might have been proteins made up of raight and left handed aminos acids, or that some radiation from a passing star might have turned all the amino acids left handed. This is pure Darwinian ‘I have no difficulty in imagining’ speculation.

6) PEPTIDE BONDING Let’s wave Darwin’s magic wand and suppose away all the above basic chemistry problems and imagine a sea filled with left handed (laevo) amino acids of all the 20 different kinds we know are needed to make proteins.

This of course defies everything we know about physics and chemistry, but let’s follow Charles Darwin’s example and use our faith and imagination to overcome multiple impossibilities.

Surely now life will form? Er, no actually. We are still many steps short of the minimum needs for a single strand of protein.

Amino acids form together in a specific kind of chemical bond called a peptide bond. This process occurs rapidly and efficiently in all living cells, where the templates, enzymes, ADP/ATP energy systems, Krebs cycle and information systems that make up the ‘protein factory’ are all present and working correctly in relationship to each other. However, protein synthesis in a living cell is an irreducibly complex system, meaning that if you take away any part of the system, it doesn’t work AT ALL. So even an ocean full of laevo amino acids won’t make any protein, because joining amino acids in peptide bonds requires complicated intracellular machinery. The theoretical amino acids filling our pre-biotic sea will just sit there until they are oxidised or broken down by ultraviolet light.

Are you getting the picture yet? If so, and you have that dangerous thing -an open mind-you may wish to ask why they did not tell you about any of these roadblocks to life from non life at school, on nature TV or any other mainstream media.

7) CORRECT SEQUENCING In evolutionary speculation about the origin of life, it is customary to overcome obstacles like those above by using imagination. Charles Darwin set the standard for this in Origin of Species with his ‘I can hardly doubt…may we not suppose?…I have no difficulty in believing…may have, might have, could have, must have, DID!!!’ So let’s imagine abundant, 100% laevo amino acids that DO in fact form peptide bonds freely outside a living cell (while never forgetting that this does not occur in the real world). In our imagination, they join together, but in random sequences of course since there is no designer or instructions. They will make an extremely heterogeneous collection of nonsense proteins none of which have any function, just as random notes on a piano are not music. The final missing ingredient to making the correctly functioning protein molecules on which all biological life depends is INFORMATION.

In living cells, proteins are made using ribosomes, mitochondria,enzymes,  transport systems, on/off switches to make sure that just the right amount of the right protein is made at the right time and right place, acid base and oxygen/carbon dioxide balance maintained within a narrow range, and a cell wall to stop it all drifting apart. Proteins are assembled by peptide bonding of amino acids together in a precise sequence which is determined by information carried in code on DNA and mediated by RNA and various associated enzymes too complicated to discuss here. If you think I am obfuscating or exaggerating the complexity of the biochemical processes on which we all depend from second to second, you have the opportunity to Google things like biology of vision, haemostasis, acid/base balance, Krebs cycle etc etc. Please feel free to do so, and please see if you can find any evolutionary explanations for bioochemical processes other than ‘This must have evolved gradually from simpler processes a long, long time ago.’

Energy to fuel biochemical reactions such as protein synthesis is provided by ADP/ATP and Krebs cycle burning fuel, typically sugars. As discussed elsewhere on the site re mutations, the amino acid sequence has to be just right or the protein doesn’t function. The calculations are generously based on assuming a planet full of rich pre-biotic soup with reactions happening at the fastest imaginable rate over billions of years. Even in these idealised conditions, the chances against even a single rather small protein molecule of 100 peptide bonds forming with the amino acids in the correct sequence have been calculated as 1 x 10 to the power of 130 against. This is a number somewhat larger than the calculated total number of atoms in the universe at 10 to the power of 79. My source for this is Dr Vij Sodera’s great book ‘One Small Speck to Man: The Evolution Myth’.  

And consider this: if 1 good protein molecule was produced by chance, unimaginably large numbers of other non functional protein and polypeptide molecules would have also been formed by the same random process. They would still exist, and there sould be no means of identifying or separating out the ‘good’ strand of protein from the junk. How would the ‘right’ molecules (if any) find each other, stick together (remember, evolution has no mind, foresight or purpose) and start working together?

Even if we imagine 1 molecule of a correct protein forming, say collagen, fibrinogen, DNA polymerase, amylase, actin, insulin, or any of the other thousands of proteins needed to make a cell, it would be lost in a sea of multibillions and multibillions of junk proteins formed with incorrect, therefore useless, molecules-each one different from all the others just like random number sequences generated by the national lottery. It would never bump into another molecule the same as itself and couldn’t recognise it or know what to do if it did.

If this is not mathematical and biological proof of impossibility, bearing in mind that there is not and cannot be a ‘different kind’ of chemistry, either in the distant past or in distant space, then the word ‘impossible’ has no meaning and should be removed from our language.

8)-ORGANISATION. Even if a strand of coherent protein did form, say amylase (which helps with digestion in mammals) what is a single strand of protein going to do all on it’s own in that vast ocean of junk protein? Remember the ultraviolet light, heat and lightning energy all the time striving to break it down. Without the protection of a cell wall, it would drift around until it broke down entropically.

Once again, lets imagine the foregoing difficulties have been overcome and you have all the correct proteins for a living cell. If you took all the correctly assembled proteins present in a single celled animal and put them, in their correct proportions, in a sterile test tube with correct acid base balance and the correct temperature, what will they do? They will sit there moving around randomly until time and motion degrade them, according to the laws of thermodynamics.

They will never form a living cell because a living cell is not simply a collection of proteins and other biochemicals jumbled together in a sack, it is a highly complicated machine in which all the parts are coherently organised in functional relation to the other parts. Stomachs need brains, muscles need kidneys, skin needs a liver, mouth needs blood-everything needs everything else at the cellular level just as at the whole animal level. 

Again, don’t take my word for ANY of this, it’s all readily checkable, although official textbooks tend to be a bit shy about facts which falsify molecules to man evolution so you may have to dig a little into serious science books or web sites. Look up some videos on YouTube where there are many neat animations showing how protein synthesis and DNA transcription take place.

One last thing, what’s the theoretical self-made ‘simple’ cell going to eat? All animals, even the bacteria n the deep sea floor, eat other animals or plants or their detritus, plants produce energy from sunlight using chlorophyll and the photosynthesis process, which is UNBELIEVABLY complicated and has no precursors. Again, take my word for nothing-look up photosynthesis and ask yourself how it evolved. What is our first proposed cell going to consume as an energy source?

In conclusion

It can be seen that there are numerous stages at which the emergence of a single strand of protein from non life is blocked by inviolable laws of physics and chemistry, as can be repeatedly shown by experiments. The above is simplified-the real difficulties for undesigned life from non life are far greater as you can see when you go deeper into the biochemistry.

The committed evolutionist will sneer and say ‘It must have happened anyway even if we don’t have all the answers yet. Science is working on it. We will have answers one day, you’ll see!’

How is this beleif in undesigned origin of life in the face of all the biochemical objections not a faith position?

The basic science points I have set out above are all routinely ignored as children are taught that we have a sufficient experimental basis to accept that life comes from non life, as in “Water may have once existed on Mars, therefore life might have (for ‘might have’ read ‘obviously must have’) come into being there’. We keep getting this speculation about ‘new’ planets like Gleise 581. Nobody is asking the above basic biochemistry questions.

Now, to anyone who has read this far, what about the idea that molecules to man evolution is based on repeatable scientific experiments and can in theory be falsified? I have put forward numerous hard science facts, all readily checkable from non-creationist sources and some of them VERY basic, which falsify the standard life from non-life story at numerous successive stages. None of these facts are original to me, they are all out there in the scientific literature and can be checked on line at neutral sites. Yet they say ‘there is no controversy’ and try to silence those who question the orthodoxy. I have been called an idiot and a stone age, science-denying religious nutcase for asking the above questions and drawing attention to the above facts.

If any students are reading this, will you find the nerve to put any of the above science points to your teachers? Be prepared for evasion, ridicule and name calling if you try. It might be easier and safer just to memorise and regurgitate what they feed you, as I had to do for my zoology A level in 1975.

So where does this get us in proposing a non-intelligently directed starting point for life? Nowhere? No, its much worse than that. The Miller Urey experiments and their successors were (and still are) widely hailed as proving that the ‘chemicals of life’ could come about by random processes, are in the text books, and are taught to children as ‘evidence’. They are the best that naturalistic science has been able to do so far in this field, despite considerable effort. They fail at numerous successive points.

Even if proteins could form naturally in a ‘pre biotic soup’, and everything we know about them shows they don’t and can’t, the production of functioning proteins is a necessary but not a sufficientstep to make the first living cell without which any supposed evolution by natural selection could not even have begun. All the evidence is that not even a single protein molecule can form without pre-existing fully functioning cellular mechanisms plus substrates (e.g. sugar) to work on.

Some 3,000 different proteins are found in a human cell. Many inherited diseases, some of them very nasty indeed, occur if just one of those proteins is constructed wrongly or produced in the wrong amount or location. Tay Sachs, Huntingdon’s disease and Sickle Cell are two examples to look up. Protein synthesis is extremely difficult both to do and to regulate, but it happens fantastically easily and quickly in a living cell. This is neither accident nor maig: there are specific molecular engines, enzymes, mitochondria, ribosomes, DNA, RNA and an acid/base stabilised cytoplasm etc etc etc all working together in purposeful and controlled harmony. However, none of these things can have been present in the supposed pre-biotic soup, since they are all products of DNA giving instructions to a fully functioning cell.

There does not therefore seem to be any way of getting proteins from the random action of electrical energy on simple chemicals other than by Darwin style supposition and imagination, or Dawkins style bluster and confabulation. No wonder the atheists driving evolutionist indoctrination want to shut down debate, even using the law to try to prevent inconvenient questions being asked.

Unless a realistic undesigned origin of life model can be developed, evolution does not so much stumble at the first hurdle, or fail to get off the starting line, but fails to even qualify to take part in the race.

The Miller Urey experiments are still put forward as evidence to support atoms to life by accident.  All they do is showcase the apparently overwhelming difficulties of even getting to the starting point of useable amino acids, before even considering the other multiple road blocks to getting from amino acids to a protein as I have briefly outlined above. It is instructive to observe the attempts of materialist evolutionists to prevent attention being drawn to the problems of abiogenesis, and above all to prevent these difficulties being put to science students before their evolutionary indoctrination is complete.

Prof Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA and a great believer in the naturalistic (i.e. accidental) origin of life, said, “The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions that had to be satisfied to get it going.” Prof. Crick goes on to argue that these difficulties might be overcome in long periods of time. But this is hardly commendable of him, he has nowhere else to go but the appeal to billions of years. But do the laws of physics vary over time? The appeal to vast amounts of time is special pleading: there is no scientific justification for believing that time can overcome the basic laws that we observe to govern the behaviour of chemicals. A Creator God existing outside time and disposing of unlimited power and wisdom can create life. The creationist only has to believe one ‘impossible’ thing, but people who believe in an undesigned, materialistic origin of life have to believe many.

PS at this point, the old schoolboy canard ‘Who made God?’ may arise. This question assumes that God had to have an origin, whereas the  Judaeo/Christian revelation informs us that God is an eternal being without beginning or end. Whys should that be a problem? The point cannot be made too often that there has to be an initial uncreated first cause. This axiom derives from the fact of the Cosmos existing and the logical impossibility of infinite regression. There unavoidably has to have been an initial ‘Something’ that exists in and of itself, the debate is about the nature of the Initial Something, mind matter or spirit. If this original entity was mindless, as atheists must believe, then mind arose from matter and energy by mindless processes. If the original entity had/has a mind, this explains the evidence of design and the failure of undesigned life from non life scenarios. Which way is the evidence pointing? If the uncreated first cause had a mind, we may as well call it God. And God has not let us to wonder and speculate in the dark, he has revealed himself in his son Jesus whom the prophets foretold and who rose from the dead. This matters, a lot.

Acts 17:30 ‘The times of ignorance God overlooked, but he now commands all men everywhere to repent.’