What Are the Odds for Life?

How did life come about? Could there be life elsewhere in the universe? Did life evolve spontaneously? What are the odds for this? This question has long been pondered in the scientific and philosophical community. Humans have tried for decades to create life in the laboratory, only to have failed miserably. Spontaneous Generation is the theory that holds that life arose by mere chance with the right timing, the right chemicals, proteins and amino acids, and the right environment for such to live.

In 1952 a graduate student in Chicago attempted to emulate prebiotic conditions on a young Earth "billions of years ago." But organic life and DNA were never "created." [1] What biochemists cannot do given almost unlimited funding, time, and contact with the brightest and best scientific minds in the world -- a "simmering, primordial stew". There have been several other simulation experiments over the years, yet not even one time, has anyone, anywhere, ever been able to make the sugar-like molecules dioxy-ribose and ribose necessary to build DNA and RNA molecules." [1]

Random chemical reactions are not what any biochemist would bet on when making something as detailed as DNA, even in the fullness of this time of incredible scientific knowledge. Even so, they have tried countless times to produce life and found it impossible. Some of the most recent discoveries have added even more difficulties to the "primordial stew hypothesis". Thus, the origin of DNA/RNA continues to remain one of the greatest and potentially unsolvable scientific mysteries. And science has never proven nor do they hold a formula for the purely, random chemical explanation that attempts to answer the origin of the complex DNA molecules necessary for life.

By the mid-19th century, so much evidential support had been accumulated, primarily due to the work of Louis Pasteur and others, that the theory of spontaneous generation had been effectively disproved. Pasteur himself remarked, after a definitive finding in 1864, "Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment." [2] The collapse of spontaneous generation, however, left a vacuum of scientific thought on the question of how life had first arisen. So this community turned to Biogenesis.

Biogenesis, which Pasteur believed was true, is the process of life forms producing other life forms, like a spider lays eggs, which develop into spiders. [3, 4] The term is also used for the assertion that living matter can only be generated by other living matter, in contrast to the hypotheses of abiogenesis which hold that life can arise from non-life under suitable circumstances, although these circumstances still remain unknown.

Abiogenesis, on the other hand, deals with the origin of life; it's the study of how life on Earth emerged from inanimate organic and inorganic molecules. Scientific research theorizes that abiogenesis occurred sometime between 4.4 and 3.5 billion years ago. By 2.4 billion years ago the ratio of stable isotopes of carbon (12C and 13C), iron (56Fe, 57Fe, and 58Fe) and sulfur (32S, 33S, 34S, and 36S) pointed to a biogenic origin of minerals and sediments and molecular biomarkers that indicated photosynthesis. [4] This sounds a little like Goldilocks having to have everything "just right" before it would ever happen. Never mind that scientists have tried countless times in vain to replicate these conditions. The Abiogenesis is a limited field of research despite its profound impact on biology and human understanding of the natural world. Progress in this field is generally slow and sporadic, reasons being that it depends upon a disproved theory (spontaneous generation) to be true.

Until the 19th century, it was commonly believed that life frequently arose from non-life under certain circumstances, a process known as spontaneous generation. This belief was due to the common observation that maggots or mold appeared to arise spontaneously when organic matter was left exposed. It was later discovered that under all these circumstances commonly observed, life only arises from the replication of other living organisms. Any example can be found in any bachelor's refrigerator; usually a science experiment to itself.

But Louis Pasteur thought that bacteria could not develop this way (by spontaneous generation), like in sealed containers, because the life force could not get in. When the theory of spontaneous generation was finally laid to rest in 1859 by the young French chemist, the French Academy of Sciences sponsored a contest for the best experiment either proving or disproving spontaneous generation. Pasteur's winning experiment was a variation of the methods of Needham and Spallanzani. Pasteur had both refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and convincingly demonstrated that microorganisms are everywhere, including the air we breathe. [5]

Since scientific experiments have failed so miserably in reproducing spontaneous life, the possibility was assessed mathematically. Few are as expert in this field as Dr. Harold Morowitz from Yale University, who is a theoretics expert. Dr. Morowitz deals with the laws of large numbers and probabilities.

Here is how the probabilities theory works. You take a set of circumstances, and you scientifically determine the odds of a certain outcome. For instance, if you flip a coin, you have even odds of heads or tails. The more you flip it, the greater the odds are against it coming up heads every time. Once you get to 1/1015, the probability of an event ever happening is negligible. This is what Dr. Morowitz is saying. If you get to 1/1050, the event could not have happened even once in 15 billion-years. [6]

After studying the complexity of a protein molecule, Dr. Morowitz made the conclusion that the probability of life occurring by chance is 1/10236. [6] The odds are so hard to get your mind around that 1/10236 takes into account all the atoms in the universe, and the chance that every one of these, and at just the right time and just the right ones came together, they just might form one single protein molecule. And one protein molecule of itself is dead unless another is formed quickly. And we have already seen those odds (1/10236).

Dr. Morowitz says that the universe would have to be trillions of years older, and trillions of times larger, for a protein molecule to have occurred merely by random chance. The odds Dr. Morowitz is talking about is like throwing 4 billion pennies into the air and having every last one end up "heads". Scientists and even some evolutionists tell us that given enough time, this could happen. But as we just learned, there hasn't been enough time and there aren't enough pennies. The odds are so overwhelming as to be thought of as impossible.

However, by this same infinite stretch of logic, many of those same scientists say that a DNA molecule containing four billion bytes of perfectly arranged information did not come from a source of intelligence. It just "happened!" Ruhla's "Physics of Chance" deals with how to derive the predictions of quantum theory. The quantum theory also deals with probabilities. [7]

The biological aspect of life originating on its own also seems just as impossible as the appearance of male and female. Dr. Larry Anderson, a Wellington, Kansas physician, told me that he "...can not see how the male and female sexes evolved or developed separately without the specie going extinct". How is it possible that the species' male and female sex organs were evolving, separately and at the same time, yet still being dependent upon each other to continue the specie and prevent extinction?

Anyone who has ever looked at a high school or college science textbooks, has noticed that the odds for life arising on its own are never mentioned. But to believe, without evidence, that every living thing came into existence by improbable random chance and by its environment, is like believing that a perfect dictionary came out of a gigantic printing press explosion. Anything that humans have ever created is the result of a designed product; one in which point to a designer (human in this case). The design argument is literally as old as the hills, but how can the skeptics conquer the counter-intuitive certainty: that information assumes intelligence. And intelligence assumes a mind. A mind infers a personage.
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If you were to walk around on another planet and see stones in a perfect triangle, you could possibly assume that it all came together over eons of time by chance. But if you were to come upon a Wal-Mart shopping bag, you most certainly would not say, "Hey, look what the atmospheric pressure has done here." This is because information assumes intelligence.

It is actually better called the "argument to design," the original information density in the ordered human, plant and animal kingdom. Evolution simply cannot explain the information order of the human cell. Order has not evolved on it's own. There is enough information in a single thread of human DNA to fill 600,000 pages of information. That is specified complexity, not just aesthetics. More genetic information can fit on the head of a pin than all the libraries in the world can contain.

Thomas Edison was one of the world's greatest scientists, and he said "We do not know a millionth of one percent about anything." Let me repeat: Let's say that you have an incredible one percent of all the knowledge in the universe. Would it be possible, in the ninety-nine percent of the knowledge that you haven't yet come across, that there might be ample evidence to prove the existence of God? If you are reasonable, you will be forced to admit that it is possible. Somewhere, in the knowledge you haven't yet discovered, there could be enough evidence to prove that God does exist.

One scientist has remarked that the possibility of the human enzyme and our chemical makeup coming together by accident is one in ten to the 40,000th power. Ten to the 40,000th power is more than all the atoms in all of the known galaxies of the universe. Any mathematician understands that when you reach that level of improbability, then it can be reasonable stated that it could never happen by random chance. Therefore it must have been intentionally designed. And if there is design, it stands to reason that there must be a purpose. Stephen Hawking, a well known pro-evolutionist once publicly stated that, if we knew the "why" of life, we would know the mind of God. And for those who know it was an Intelligent Designer, the question of the "why" of life, has already been answered (John 3:16).

　

　

1. Kerr, R. A. October 6, 2006. Has lazy mixing spoiled the primordial stew? Science 6, 314:36-37. (p. 36,37).

2. Oparin, Aleksandr I. (1953). Origin of Life. Dover Publications, New York. pp. p.196. ISBN 0486602133.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation]

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogenesis

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

6. Coppedge, Dr. James F. Quoting Dr. Harold Morowitz, Yale University, in Molecular Biology and the Laws of Chance, 1993. Published by Probability Research In Molecular Biology. Northridge, CA 91321 (p. 77)

7. Ruhla, Dr. Charles 1992 [1989]. The Physics of Chance. G. Barton, translator. Oxford: University Press. (P. 152-203).

　　

An excerpt from Chapter Seven, from the book, "Blind Chance or Intelligent Design?, Empirical Methodologies and the Bible" from Amazon.com