4. Simple Life Forms: an Oxymoron (1)

Our universe is remarkably fine tuned for the existence of life. Also, we have seen that our earth is a rare planet, against all odds providing the perfect characteristics and critical conditions required to support life. All this is necessary for any life to exist, but it does not mean that if all these conditions are present, life just starts. What is the scientific view of when life starts? What does it take for a living organism to come into existence? Is a “simple” life form indeed very simple? Or is even the “simplest” life form more complex than anything we as humans can even imagine?

Life In a Soup – First Life on Earth

How did first life start on earth?  According to the Big Bang model when earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago it was a lifeless, very hostile place. But the fossil record teaches us, that somehow in a period of less than a billion years, more than 3.7 billion years ago, the first life forms came into existence. These were micro-organisms, the simplest life forms imaginable, one cell bacteria and organisms that resembled blue-green algae. Very “simple” life, but still living cells. These organisms were able, using information stored in their cells, to absorb and process energy from their environment to grow and replicate.

"Soups" on Primordial Earth

Faith and abiogenesis: What is the scientific view of when life starts? How this giant leap from no-life to first life (also called abiogenesis) happened is one of the most intriguing mysteries in science. Especially in our generation we have learned a lot about how living organisms actually work. We are able to study and analyze all the different components in a cell and observe their role and behavior. We can watch as genetic information is unraveled and is used to build new molecules, and we’re all baffled by its perfection and complexity. But all today’s life on earth came from previous life. As a child needs a mother to be born, likewise with all living organisms we know – they all come from parent organisms (this is referred to as biogenesis). Can this chicken and egg cycle be broken? How did the first living organism come into existence?

Charles Darwin himself never spent much time researching first life. He assumed simple life was so simple that it would just “start to exist”. In a letter of Darwin to Joseph Dalton Hooker of February 1, 1871, he made the suggestion that life may have begun in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, [so] that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes." He went on to explain that "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." In other words, the presence of life itself prevents the spontaneous generation of simple organic compounds today – a circumstance which confines the search for first life to a controlled environment in a laboratory.

Of course evolutionists have diligently searched for answers. You might recall the narrative of the prebiotic or primordial soup as the construction site for life from your school days. The following typical “recipe for life” [1] is found in evolutionary textbooks:

“To find out if there is life in the Universe, it's useful to look at how it began here on earth. Follow our step-by-step recipe to see how life started:

1)      Mix ingredients
For life to evolve, simple molecules have to combine to form more complex ones. This mixing would have happened in the seas of the early earth, often called the primordial soup.

2)      Add energy
Next you need energy. This may have come from lightning storms or hot underwater springs. This injection of energy sparked chemical reactions. These simple molecules began joining to form larger, more complex ones, called “amino acids”. In a classic experiment in 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey recreated the primordial soup in the laboratory. By passing electricity through a mixture of simple molecules, they were able to make amino acids.

3)      Form complex molecules
Amino acids then joined together end-to-end to form long, chain-like molecules, known as proteins. Proteins are essential for building a living creature. They are involved in the formation of just about everything in your body, from the color of your skin to the layout of neurons in your brain.

4)      Wait for life to reproduce
Another complex molecule that was formed during these reactions was DNA. DNA has an amazing characteristic that makes it essential for life – it can reproduce itself. It also carries all the code to make a living creature.”

However – does this make sense? Is this what modern evolutionary scientists really believe? Before we can answer these questions, we need to better understand what a simple life form really is.

Read on: Exhibit #5: Life cannot have Started by Chance