Did life just come from Chemicals?

So far in this discussion we have looked at the possibility of one kind of animal turning into a totally different kind of animal. However if we go back in evolutionary history from that, where did the first life form come from? According to evolutionary theory life came from a group of chemicals that under went some kind of reaction in the primordial earth.

The idea that life can come from non-life has been around for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians thought that mice came from the mud of the river Nile. Even years later it was commonly thought that maggots arose from rotting meat. The belief that bacteria arose from non-life continued until a scientist (a creationist) called Louis Pasteur demonstrated that the only way to get life is from life. He called this the law of biogenesis, stating clearly that life cannot arise from non-life. The theory of chemical evolution goes completely against this law.

So have scientists managed to produce life from non-life? Many have tried, but no experiment has succeeded. A scientist called Stanley Miller made an attempt at this and claimed that he had succeeded. However a closer look at his experiment shows that even he did not succeed (for more info on Stanley Miller’s experiment click here.

If this is the case then we have to ask the question, is chemical evolution actually possible? Scientist Hubert Yockey summed it up in the following statement:

The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual machine is in probability. The extremely small probabilities calculated in this chapter are not discouraging to true believers … [however] A practical person must conclude that life didn’t happen by chance. Hubert P. Yockey, 1992. Information Theory and Molecular Biology, Cambridge University Press, UK, p. 336.

The famous British scientist Sir Fred Hoyle put it the following way in his book Evolution from Space:

Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate ... . It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect ... higher intelligences ... even to the limit of God ... such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident.

In another statement he even went as far as saying that the chance of life coming from non-life was comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from materials therein.

Interestingly enough Sir Fred Hoyle was not a creationist, his explanation was that aliens came and deposited life on earth. But then this begs the question; where did the aliens come from? It’s only pushing the problem further back in time. The only logical explanation is that life was created supernaturally from the living God. To find more information on chemical evolution please click here.