(Abiogenesis) – Science or Pseudoscience?

NOTE: While the definition of ‘life’ has never been universally agreed upon, we will refer to the most common definition of a unit of life – a single cell organism.

It is known that DNA is made up of the same nonorganic elements typically found in dust:

“The basic chemicals found in DNA are carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and phosphorous.”
Mitochondrial DNA Testing website, “What is DNA made of?” page.
http://www.mitochondrialdnatesting.com/what-is-dna-made-of.html

These elements assemble into an instructional program that creates the essential biological ‘raw materials’ that organize into a single cell:
“Cells have many parts, each with a different function. Some of these parts, called organelles, are specialized structures that perform certain tasks within the cell.”
Genetics Home Reference Handbook, “What is a cell?”
http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/basics/cell

For more information, go to our ‘Genetics’ page:
http://whoisyourcreator.com/genetics.html

In the past, the complexity of a single cell was unknown. But today, it is inexcusable for anyone to seriously think that a cell could have ‘self’-assembled itself. Refer to videos:

“DNA Structure”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy8dk5iS1f0
“The machine of DNA in real time” from Walter Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9ff4FQ39CE
“DNA: Secrete of Life” from PBS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41_Ne5mS2ls
“Journey Inside The Cell” from Discovery Institute.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fiJupfbSpg&feature=bulletin

But, the trend now is to simply cast aside the principle of cause and effect and instead believe in the unguided spontaneous molecular self-assembly of a cell:

• “’While the ribosome is a complex structure it features a clear hierarchy that emerged based on basic chemical principles,’ says Sergey Steinberg, a Université de Montréal biochemistry professor who made his discovery with student Konstantin Bokov. ‘In the absence of such explanations, some people could imagine unseen forces at work when such complex structures emerge in nature.’”
  University of Montreal, “Origin of Life On Earth: Scientists Unlock Mystery Of Molecular Machine,” March 1, 2009, ScienceDaily.
  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090219105324.htm
• “We proposed that the genetic material could drive the growth of cells just by virtue of being there.”
  Jack W. Szostak, “Battle of the Bubbles May Have Sparked Evolution”, September 03, 2004, Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Research News.
  http://www.hhmi.org/news/szostak4.html

In 2005, Harvard University launched their Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative to study how life could have spontaneously begun without God:

• “”My expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention,” said David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard.”
  Harvard University, “Harvard launches project researching origins of life”, August 15, 2005, Deseret News Publishing Co.
  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20050815/ai_n14882732/print

The “very simple series of logical events” was obviously overstated because there is still NO naturalistic explanation for how life could have come from non-life:

• “Today, the question of the origins of life in the universe remains one of humankind’s most compelling mysteries.”
  Harvard University’s “Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative” website, “About” page.
  http://origins.harvard.edu/About.html
• “We simply do not know the chemical mechanisms that brought forth life on earth.”
  Reports of the National Center of Science Education, “ Recent Advances on the Origin of Life – Making Biological Polymers,” January-February 2011.
  http://reports.ncse.com/index.php/rncse/article/view/4/5
• “How did life start on Earth? Science still has no definitive answer. But in the 1950s, a pair of pair of chemists mixed a stew of poisonous gases, like you’d find at a volcano. They zapped it with electricity, mimicking lightning. And they found that they’d created a few amino acids. All life on Earth relies on these compounds to make proteins…
  But how those oases of amino acids started to come together and form life? Well, the origin of life as we know it remains a mystery.”
  David Biello, “The Origin of Life,” March 27, 2011, Scientific American.
  http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=the-origin-of-life-11-03-27
• “There is no evidence life can be produced from non-life, at least on Earth. In fact, given the incredible complexity of even the simplest of single celled creatures, unless given an eternity of infinite time, it is difficult to conceive of how life could have been generated anywhere. Dr. Harold Klein, the chairman of a National Academy of Sciences committee which reviewed all the evidence, concluded that it is impossible to imagine how life could have been created (Horgan 1991, p. 120). Many other scientists have come to the same conclusion (Hoyle 1974; Kuppers 1990; Yockey 1977). Even the random creation of DNA seems a near impossibility. Kuppers (1990) sums it up this way: ‘The expectation probability for the nucleotide sequence of a bacterium is thus so slight that not even the entire space of the universe would be enough to make the random synthesis of a bacterial genome probable.’”
  “The Infinite Universe vs the Myth of the Big Bang: Red Shifts, Black Holes, Acceleration, Life: 13.The Biological Cosmological Principle:Life and The Eternal Infinite Universe,” January 3, 2010, Journal of Cosmology, 2010, Vol 6, 1548-1615.
  http://journalofcosmology.com/Cosmology4.html

Spontaneous or purposeful?

Because random ‘self-assembly’ of life from non-life is a stretch, the word ‘spontaneous’ was replaced with the more seemingly scientific term called ‘abiogenesis.’ Instead of an instant assembly of inorganic materials, abiogenesis supposedly gives way to a slower piecemeal brew that still miraculously assembles itself into a self-sustaining single cell organism:
“Instead of life arising from non-life on a regular and observable basis, abiogenesis proposes life arising from non-life at some particular point in the ancient, unobservable past. But abiogenesis differs from spontaneous generation in another important way. While spontaneous generation proposed the emergence of a complete, complex cell or organism from organic molecules in one huge jump, abiogenesis draws from gradualism, where the original life forms were much simpler than modern cells and only gradually evolved their present-day form of complexity. Thus, abiogenesis not only places the spontaneous generation of life far in the past, but the life that is generated was supposedly much simpler, thus easier to generate spontaneously.”
http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Abiogenesis

Other speculations:
http://www.physorg.com/news115988029.html
http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2007/463.html
http://www.uga.edu/news/artman/publish/071030_DNA.shtml
http://www.hhmi.org/news/szostak4.html

REVIEW HOW ABIOGENESIS HOLDS UP WHEN USING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD OF TESTING A HYPOTHESIS:

1. Make observations.
2. Form a testable, unifying hypothesis to explain these observations.
   “By ‘testable,’ we mean the predictions must include examples of what is likely be observed if the hypothesis is true and of what is unlikely to be observed if the hypothesis is true. A hypothesis that can explain all possible data equally well is not testable, nor is it scientific. A good scientific hypothesis must rule out some conceivable possibilities, at least in principle.”
   http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/sciproof.html
3. Deduce predictions from the hypothesis.
4. Search for confirmations of the predictions; if the predictions are contradicted by empirical observation, go back to step (2).
   (From: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/sciproof.html)

Results:
Using the standards established by the Scientific Method listed above, each evolutionary explanation for Abiogenesis has:

1. NO observations of occurrence;
2. NO defining hypotheses that allow for testing;
3. NO exclusive predictions that allow for deductions;
4. No confirmations because there are NO exclusive predictions.

REVIEW WHAT IS CONSIDERED AS NATURALISTIC BY EVOLUTIONARY STANDARDS:

“In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring phenomena. Natural causes are, in principle, reproducible and therefore can be checked independently by others.”
“Science, Evolution, and Creationism,” 2008, National Academy of Sciences (NAS), The National Academies Press, third edition, page 10.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11876&page=10

Using the standards above:

• Are there any evolutionary explanations for the evolution of life from non-life a “naturally occurring phenomena” within know scientific information, laws, and principles?
• Can any be “reproducible and therefore can be checked independently by others”?

Results:
Since the answer is “no,” all existing evolutionary explanations for the evolution of life from non-life MUST be given the correct status of being supernatural, i.e. something attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces.

	“Despite considerable experimental and theoretical effort, no compelling scenarios currently exist for the origin of replication and translation, the key processes that together comprise the core of biological systems and the apparent pre-requisite of biological evolution. The RNA World concept might offer the best chance for the resolution of this conundrum but so far cannot adequately account for the emergence of an efficient RNA replicase or the translation system.” —Eugene V. Koonin