How Did Life Begin?
Jun 26, 2008
The title of Darwin's famous book, The Origin of the Species, can be confusing because it gives the impression that he is going to tell us his theory of how life began. However, in the book, Darwin does not discuss the actual origin of life but his theory of how the life that was here developed into the complexity we see today. In other words, Darwin did not even attempt to tell us how life began, nor did he describe himself as an outright atheist.
When Darwin developed the theory of natural selection in the mid 1800's, the face of science was much different. In the absence of powerful microscopes, Darwin believed the cell to be nothing more than protoplasm, a mere bubble of jelly. Today scientists cannot even talk of the cell without using terms that refer to building and engineering. Francis Crick, co-founder of DNA, writes, "The cell is thus a minute factory, bustling with rapid, organized chemical activity. Nature invented the assembly line some billions of years before Henry Ford." The problem this presents for the theory of evolution as an all consuming theory is that even these single cells are far too complex to be produced by gradual, single trait, natural selection. No single part of the cell would give any survival power to a cell; rather, each part would all have to be present in order to function properly. Thus, natural selection could not simply select each trait individually. Michael Behe uses the example of a tiny string like flagellum which is attached like a tail to some bacteria. It is a microscopic outboard rotary motor that comes equipped with a hook, joint, drive shaft, O-rings, a stator, and a bi-directional acid-powered motor that can do 100,000 RPMs. In addition, even the simplest living cell is one of the most complicated structures on earth, containing within it more information than multiple sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. From this information Dinesh D'Souza comments, "It is crucially important to realize that this basic template of life, with all its intricate machinery of RNA and DNA, came fully formed with the first appearance of life. D'Souza's concludes, "Is it even reasonable to speculate that random combinations of atoms could have produced so marvelously complex and functional a thing as a living cell?" Yet Richard Dawkins writes, "However improbably the origin of life might be, it must have happened this way because we are here." D'Souza's response is scathing: "It takes a lot of faith to believe things like this."
If believing that a fully functioning cell arrived on the scene independent of God or any creation event takes tremendous faith, it takes even more faith to believe that the first cell formed came imbedded with the instructions and the design to reproduce. Even if we believe that a complex unicellular organism could have somehow "appeared" on the scene randomly, how could we believe that the newly formed cell came with the "goal" of reproduction? It is much more likely that the cell would have appeared on the scene and then faded away with no way to pass on its genes. Yet atheists like Dawkins and Dennet require us to believe that all living organisms have one innate goal-reproduction. Where did organisms get such a ‘goal?' How did they know that this was their chief responsibility in life? Why did they need a purpose? Somehow we are to believe that complex, encyclopedic organisms magically appeared on earth with innate goals for life and ‘desires' to asexually reproduce. Lastly, if we follow the fundamentalists that far, then we also have to create a way that natural selection could have moved us from asexual reproduction, a very simple way to pass on genes to bisexual reproduction, a more complicated way to pass on genes because it requires much more time and the tiresome task of finding an agreeable partner!
Now the atheists will respond that my arguments are killing scientific inquiry because I can't "imagine how such a thing could happen." This could not be further from the truth and in fact misses the whole point. The point is to again ask the question of what has the greatest consistency of evidence. Natural selection, though a great theory that explains much about the life on our planet, simply fails as an overall explanation for the beginning of life and for the complexity which we see. It takes much less faith to believe that we have a God who is creative, complex, and orderly who imbedded these things into His world?