A Christian Worldview: How Did We Get Here? Part I

Earth is a very friendly environment for life, even in places that seem completely inhospitable. Virtually anywhere one goes on or near the surface of the planet, life is teeming. In the biosphere of this planet the chemical processes of life find a safe haven for their action and interaction. And yet, whereas biogenesis is rampant on the planet, abiogenesis is non-existent, not even in experiments designed in its favor. Is that a problem?

It isn't for me, but then I'm a believer in biblical creationism. For the atheistic evolutionist, however,  it is an insurmountable wall. If the evolutionist does not have a plausible, credible, demonstrable theory for how chemicals progressed from soup to life, they have nothing but a realization that species adapt because of breeding and mutation. They do not have an explanation for the origin of life, therefore no explanation for the origin of species, nowhere near an explanation of where we came from, and certainly no reason to pitch concerns about a Creator over us out the window.

There are really only two possibilities to explain the origin of life on earth: it arose by chance chemical reactions or it arose as the result of purpose. Those who favor atheistic or naturalistic explanations favor chance, folks of a more spiritual bent prefer purpose. The promoters of chance must embrace an existential nightmare springing from the meaninglessness of life, the promoters of purpose are faced with the weighty matter of whose or what purpose brought life into being. It seems to me the chance promoters have a bigger challenge that requires a greater faith!

The basic building block of life as we know it is protein, a polymer made up of varying units of some 22 different amino acids. Nucleic acids, enzymes, sugars, lipids, as well as liquid water, are essential, but everything truly alive is made of protein. The precursor molecules of these organic materials have been shown to self-assemble in both natural environments and experimentally, so it seems a simple matter to serendipitously get the right zap, and presto chango, life sparks into existence. But that didn't happen, it couldn't have happened, it will never happen because it's impossible. Why?

Probabilities for one thing. Life, even in its simplest forms, is actually very complex. It's not just the order of elements in biochemical compounds that matters, it's also the shape of the molecule. Chirality, as much as anything else, is what allows the proper shape to be possible: in living things amino acids are left-handed, sugars right-handed. To function in the processes of life, compounds must be made of the right stuff in the right order and in the right shape. If not, processes go wrong or don't function at all.

That said, what of the probabilities I mentioned? Given a rich chemical soup containing an infinite supply of amino acid residues, the odds of a single, specific, small (150 residues long) functioning protein self-assembling is more than astronomical--1 in 10 to the 1064th power (my thanks to Dr. Meyer). To get a sense of that magnitude, there may be no more than 10 to 86th atoms in the entire universe! Even if there were natural, chemical ways in which these odds could be lessened they still would not become anywhere near probable, and we're only talking about one, small protein. Life requires multiple proteins, generally much longer.

The likelihood of one small, specific, functioning protein self-assembling in a chemical soup is, for all intents and purposes, impossible.

RNA-world theories hardly fare any better. Order in sequence is still necessary for function, particularly since protein synthesis is ultimately required to produce life as we know it. Even if the can is kicked down the ally a way, it still has to be picked up to clean up the situation. From my layman's perspective, the specificity of functioning proteins is still the hurdle (biologically and probabilistically) that a naturalistic origin of life must get over, even if starting with RNA. Self-assembling the thing that could code the assembling of a functioning protein is, if anything, more improbable than a functioning protein assembling itself.

I cannot see where experiments that demonstrate RNA's capacity for "natural selection" demonstrate anything other than RNA's replicative capacity. Has that not been understood since we've known about RNA? Those capabilities do not mitigate the probabilities involved. They certainly don't address the twin peaks of specificity and function. The truth is that the only thing we know for sure about the generation of life is that it takes life to make life. 

Given the extreme complexity in the chemistry of the cell and the time available for random sampling in any chemical soup (whether for proteins or RNA) the odds of useful, functioning, biochemicals self-assembling by chance are so insignificant as to be impossible. If all the universe were nothing but the chemicals needed, put into the most advantageous environment imaginable, the odds for self-assembly by chance would not be reduced significantly enough to change the impossibility. Life was undoubtedly created on purpose.

And even if one does not buy into purpose, the fact that life isn't coming into existence naturalistically on Earth now still has to be dealt with. The environment is very friendly now given the ubiquity of life now, and yet new life isn't spontaneously developing so far as anyone can tell. Whatever was happening to start life on Earth isn't happening now, despite how life-welcoming Earth is. We only see the unbending rule that life arises from life.

Naturalistic explanations for life's likely singular origin reach for scenarios that properly belong in the realm of imagination. The Bible, on the other hand, sets forth the scenario we see in reality--life was started at some point in the past and then ceased coming into existence--and it did so long before anyone ever did a scientifically sound abiogenesis experiment or knew just how ubiquitous life was. According Genesis 1:31-2:3, God exerted creative force in putting all creation into place, with all of its life, and then he ceased from his creative work. No more energy or mass and no more life was created afterwards.

Truth comports with reality.

Therefore, a Christian worldview perceives everything, including life, as arising from the hand of God on purpose. That is how here got here and that is how we got here. We all are creations purposefully made by God and our existence is lived in the light of our Creator who is over us. Are you ready to live life knowing there is a God who purposefully made you and to whom you must answer? Are you ready for truth?

Part II...

We Get One Shot

Here's something fun from the What You Ought to Know webshow called Time Travelling the Multiverse for all you Star Trek fans (yes, I'm ashamed to admit I'm one of you). [HT: Uncommon Descent]

Didn't think there'd be a spiritual application? You'd be wrong...

For Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God's presence. Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Then Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.
Hebrews 9: 24-28 NIV

The Incompatibility of the Bible and Evolution

I find it very disturbing that so many folks identify themselves as Bible-believing followers of Christ and yet embrace evolution. The Bible and evolution are incompatible as is betrayed by the labyrinthine exegesis of Genesis those who attempt to syncretize them invariably use to do so. The Bible says that God created life, and death followed afterwards: the evolutionist says that life was created through death. The overarching concepts are clearly at odds with with one another, and the details assure immiscibility.

The syncretic approach to origins, Theistic Evolution, is a result of faithlessness not evidence. There is not now, nor will there ever be a slam-dunk case for a scientific approach to origins that stands in opposition to the Word. Evolution relies upon trust in a godless narrative, Creationism on a God-inspired one, to fill in the speculative gaps that will always be left in either approach. Faith picks a side, whereas unbelief rides the fence. Shaky believers who mesh atheistic and biblical viewpoints attempting to achieve some happy median create nothing but a mess that destroys both.

Foundationally, I believe Jesus Christ, the Son the God, is without error in all he believed and all that he taught. He was, in fact, without error in every possible respect. If Jesus Christ was an evolutionist, he certainly gave no hint of it. Quite the opposite in fact, he believed in the biblical Creation Story and the Noahetic Flood. One can hardly cede authority to Christ as Lord and then take exception to his cosmology.

When it comes to God, it is always put up or shut up. Stand on the Word or confess to being a heathen at heart. Nothing in the scripture should cause anyone to blink if they also believe that Christ rose the dead. If one doesn't believe that, he isn't a Christian and has no basis for the forgiveness of his sins. If one does believe that, why blanch at Jesus' avowal of Creation and the Flood? Is it even possible to trust in the power of the blood of what would have to be an ignorant or duplicitous charlatan if evolution were true?

Every time the evolutionists have laid claim to a smoking gun, we have always found, after the fact, that they spoke too soon and overstated their case. Whether the claim is for missing links in the fossil record, abiogenic experiments, ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, "undesigned" nylonase, fused chimpanzee chromosomes, interchangeable genes for nanomachine parts, or junk DNA, it's always the same. So the arguments endlessly ratchet back and forth while, in the end, the realm of physical and theoretical science can offer nothing but doubt.

God chooses faith, not sight. Those who depend on sight seldom find faith, and those who depend on faith usually do just fine with sight. Why throw your faith in the Word under the bus for something that actually cast aspersions on Christ and which has nothing more as its greatest claim to fame than making a monkey out of you?

The Ubiquity of Fossils and the Bible

Ubiquity speaks of the commonness of a thing—it’s everywhere. Fossils have that quality, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the valleys of the Appalachians. In fact, fossils are so prevalent in sedimentary rock that the fossils found in it are the metric used to date it.

According to classical, uniformitarian evolutionary scenarios, fossils formed by regular processes of death, deposition, compaction and mineralization. Water, winds, volcanoes, and landslides laid down sediments upon the bodies, tracks, even the excrement of animals, upon plants, and even upon microscopic lifeforms. Those in turn were covered by other sediments, and ultimately, the column of sediments became rock with mineralized fossils embedded.

When things die, especially animal life, there is not much opportunity to preserve it in the fossil record. If a dead thing is not buried completely and relatively quickly, thousands of creatures, microscopic and large, begin a feeding frenzy. What they don’t destroy the elements do. The corpse doesn’t have thousands of days let alone thousands of years to mark its existence for posterity.

It is apparent that fossils only form if the burial process that covered the once living is rapid, as in floods, landslides, volcanism, or sandstorms. Such is demonstrated by those fossils which are like action snapshots-- creatures caught giving birth, eating, even devouring another creature. Suddenly, they were covered by sediment, eventually becoming a freeze frame in the fossil record.

But these rapid mechanisms produce not only fossils, but also sharply delineated, localized fields of sedimentary rock. The fossil bearing sedimentary rocks, however, stretch square mile after square mile in vast fields across the entire planet. About 75% of the land surface of the earth is covered by them to an average depth of over 5400 feet. The scope of these layers is the basis for the geologic column and its ability to be applied to formations across the globe. 

Generally, sediments are laid out flat, kind a like a college student during holiday breaks. If you examine an outcropping in the Appalachians it may not appear that way, but the curvy strata there were caused by folding after sedimentation. In other places where sedimentary rock is present but not horizontal other geotectonic mechanisms can be forwarded to explain its tilt.

The rule is that sediments are laid horizontally: the physics of particles precipitating out of solution or suspension demand it. Even if the floor they are settling on is serpentine, sediments settle in the low spots to a greater degree than the high spots until things are more or less evened out. When sediment fields stretch square mile after square mile in relatively uniform strata, a single body of murky water over the entire sediment field must have been responsible.

How that occurred simultaneously with all manner of flora and fauna being rapidly covered by those precipitates presents some serious problems to the uniformitarian geologist, and most certainly to the evolutionist. It seems to me they don't actually have a plausible mechanism for the ubiquity of fossils.

There is, however, a biblical answer:

For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet. Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

Genesis 7:17-24 (NIV)

In my mind, it's a better answer.

Evolution: Not A Chance

"The fool says in his heart there is no God."         Psalm 14:1

If not God, to whom or to what is our existence attributable?

Evolutionists posit chance as the mechanism that first strung together the chemicals of life and then sparked life itself from them. Add billions of years of natural selection working on chance mutations and the evolutionary formula handily creates the astounding variety of life that we see today and observe in the fossil record. All this from the simple mechanism of chance! Fortunately, chance is a statistical concept that can be treated mathematically and if we do so we can test the hypothesis.

The oddsmakers in Vegas make a living doing that kind of a thing. So let's do likewise and ask ourselves what is the likelihood that life arose by chance by doing a simple statistical exercise. Since virtually everything within the living cell is one kind of protein or another (no proteins = no life), our statistical query can concentrate on the probability of one such protein forming by chance.

Proteins are formed by linking amino acid residues into polymeric chains, most of which are hundreds of residues long, some thousands. Due to their chemical structure, amino acids form in two varieties that are mirror images of one another, one called left-handed the other right-handed. For whatever reason, all the proteins in living things are constructed of only left-handed varieties of the 20 amino acids found in life.

Living things use these proteins in very specific ways, so shape and content are very important to function. A protein chain which is not shaped (folded) properly, with the appropriate chemicals in the appropriate places, will not function as needed. Either a deficiency in (as in many diseases) or a cessation of function will result if that is the case.

So our query, as simplified as possible, will be: “What are the odds of a small, specific protein forming by chance in a chemical soup which has endless supplies of all the various amino acids necessary for life, all in their left-handed forms?” We pick a relatively small protein for this exercise, since by the evolutionary framework the first proteins would have been smaller on average than those we find in today’s lifeforms. For ease of calculation and visualization, we will use the number 100.

This calculation does not take into account that amino acids formed outside of living things are 50% right-handed, nor is any consideration given to the decay rate of a protein chains due to water, radiation or heat. The actual abundance or availability of necessary chemicals in any proposed schema for the primordial earth is not considered as well. This exercise can be likened to drawing colored balls from a box filled with 20 different colored balls supplied in infinite amounts, equally available at any given instant, in order to attain a certain sequence of colors.

We need to draw a specific color sequence from that box 100 balls long. What are the odds of doing so? The mathematics of probabilities tell us that the answer will be 1 in the total number of varieties of balls available raised by the number of balls in the sequence, or in our case 1 in 20^100. That can be restated in scientific notation as 1/(1.268 X 10^130), the denominator representing the total number of different 100 ball sequences possible without repetition. Those are some mighty small odds, some might say vanishingly small.

Just to put these incredible numbers into some context, let’s interpose time into the problem. Let’s assume it is possible to draw six billion different 100 ball sequences every second. How long would it take in “chance time” to draw the specific sequence we were looking for? We take the odds above, 1/(1.268 X 10^130), and divide them by 6 X 10^9 sequences per second, which results in odds that the one sequence desired would occur in 2.11 X 10^120 seconds, or about 6.69 X 10^112 years.

According to most evolutionary scenarios the earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Even if it was 7 billion years, probabilities suggest that even that age would have to be raised to over the twelfth power to achieve the likelihood that one specific 100 amino acid protein chain would be produced by chance. And that is assuming that 6 billion chains could be formed per second during that duration. The odds are so overwhelming, it seems to me, as to suggest the impossibility that chance produced even one usable protein, let alone life.

A very simplistic exercise, for sure, and there are evolutionists who would argue with the use of probabilities in this way. I haven’t found their arguments convincing in the least, especially since getting to a useful protein by means of RNA and DNA is only orders of magnitude more difficult with much longer odds. The statistical problem with using chance as the mechanism for the emergence of life on earth remains despite their objections and cannot be mitigated by time—billions times billions of years do not, realistically, make the odds any better.

When we consider the number of proteins that even the most basic single-celled organism uses to do what it does, including the cellular machinery used for gene expression, it just gets worse and worse and worse. With odds such as we have demonstrated here, is it even possible to claim serendipitous evolution as the source of all the wonders of life? Not even a chance!

Special thanks to Dr. Michael Behe, Dr. Stephen Meyer, the contributors of "In Six Days," and a host of others whose have proposed similar statistical analyses.