The Big Question 44: Where Did Life Come From?
Mar 18, 2019 2327
Radio Version:
Where did life come from?
When it comes to this question, Christians will tell you that life was created by God, who is the source of all life himself.
And the interesting thing is that when we turn to science to see if it has an alternative view, science actually has absolutely nothing to say about where life comes from.
When you get past all the thought bubbles, you realise that science simply doesn’t know. A lot of the popular answers about where life came from aren’t really answers at all. For example, the idea that life arrive on an asteroid from elsewhere in the universe – all that does is to try to shift the answer away from the earth – because we have no answer – to some other planet, hoping that they have the answer instead. So, the question remains, “Where did life itself come from?
Now, this is not a new question. The issue of the origin of life is one that great thinkers have worked on since antiquity. Back then, starting with the ancient Greeks, the idea of the “spontaneous generation” of life was a poplar one.
This was the idea that that living things emerged out of non-living things. This idea was actually quite popular, and people saw plenty of evidence for it. For example, if they left a piece of meat out, maggots would come out of it. It was like magic!
Of course, today, now that we are all modern and scientific, we know that that’s total nonsense. It goes against every law of science. It just can’t happen. There is absolutely no known mechanism by which life could come from non-life.
Let’s get beyond the question of what life even is. That’s a big enough problem in itself!
So, let’s assume we know. Now, one of the things we need for life to evolve from non-life is for the DNA and proteins to exist and come together at exactly the same time, purely by chance, without any kind of intelligence. British Astronomer Sir Frederick Hoyle wrote that the mathematical calculations for the probability of such a thing occurring is “nonsense of the highest order.”
The issue of the origins of proteins and DNA appears to be an insurmountable problem for atheistic scientists and philosophers, because it’s a straight-out mathematical impossibility. In fact – that it was responsible for prominent atheist Sir Anthony Flew renouncing atheism on purely rational grounds. He concluded in 2004, after championing atheism for half a century, that “super-intelligence is the only explanation for the origin of life.”
So where did life originally come from? According to evolutionist and Nobel laureate George Wald, “The only alternative” to spontaneous generation is “to believe in a single primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position” End quote.
So if life doesn’t evolve from non-life, the only possible conclusion is that life was created supernaturally.
That’s my view! If you’ve got a different explanation that solves these issues, ring up your local university!
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