The Learning Curve/The Learning Curve (Weird Science, 1996).iso/religion/essays_on_origins/essay2

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                             ESSAYS ON ORIGINS:

                             The Origin of Life
                       by Dr. David N. Menton, Ph.D.

                    This version copyright (c) 1994 by:
                     Missouri Association for Creation
   _____________________________________________________________________

    [No. 2 in a series]                      August 1993, Vol. 3, No. 8
   _____________________________________________________________________

     One of the most fundamental axioms of biology is that all life comes
  from pre-existing life.  Still, until the later part of the 19th
  century, life was believed to arise from non-living matter by a process
  called "spontaneous generation."  Ancient Egyptians, for example,
  thought mice arose from the mud of the Nile.  In 1600, J. B. Helmont
  even reported "proof" for the spontaneous generation of mice claiming
  that if wheat, cheese, and soiled linen are placed together in a jar,
  mice will eventually appear!  This idea of the spontaneous generation of
  life from non-life was so deeply ingrained in biological thought that it
  took nearly 200 years of experimental evidence to completely disprove
  it.

     In 1650, Francesco Redi, an Italian physician, proved that maggots
  come from living flies and not from lifeless meat as was widely
  believed.  This was a serious blow to spontaneous generation, but when
  bacteria were later discovered, it was thought that at least
  micro-organisms might arise from non-life.  This notion too was finally
  laid to rest in 1864 by the great scientist (and creationist) Louis
  Pasteur, who demonstrated that bacteria can only come from living
  bacteria.  When Pasteur reported his results before the French Academy
  he confidently declared that, "never will the doctrine of spontaneous
  generation arise from this mortal blow."  Pasteur never dreamed that the
  widely discredited evolutionary ideas of his contemporary, Charles
  Darwin, would one day become widely accepted by the scientific
  community, reviving once again the notion of spontaneous generation.  In
  his book, _The Origins of Life_, evolutionist Cyril Ponnamperuma said:

     "It is, perhaps, ironic that we tell beginning students in
     biology about Pasteur's experiments as the triumph of reason over
     mysticism yet we are coming back to spontaneous generation,
     albeit in a more refined and scientific sense, namely to chemical
     evolution."

     Most evolutionists are dead certain that life evolved by chance
  (without divine intervention) from non-living chemicals through a
  process called "chemical evolution."  Some evolutionists even insist
  that life must have independently evolved more than once on earth.  Most
  evolutionists are confident that life has evolved many times in many
  other places in the universe.  Although Darwin spoke longingly of the
  chance origin of life from simple chemicals in some "warm little pond,"
  there has never been evidence that anything remotely like this has ever
  happened.  In fact, the evidence for chemical evolution is so
  embarrassing, some evolutionists insist that the whole idea of the
  origin of life is not even a part of the theory of evolution but rather
  is a creationist plot to discredit evolution!

     Evolutionists speculate that life gradually evolved from mere
  hydrogen in a series of stages.  The first stage began about 15 billion
  years ago with the "Big Bang" which produced an expanding cloud of
  hydrogen gas -- all else was void.  With time and energy, hydrogen
  transformed into all the other chemical elements.  Then, about 4 billion
  years ago, the earth's atmosphere consisted of methane, ammonia,
  hydrogen and water, from which life would inevitably evolve.

     During stage two it is believed that simple chemicals from stage one
  formed the small _organic molecules_ essential to life such as sugars,
  amino acids and nucleotides.  In 1953, Miller and Urey claimed to
  "simulate" the evolution of some of these organic molecules from methane
  and ammonia using apparatus and conditions designed to achieve the
  desired result.

     Stage three in chemical evolution is supposed to have involved the
  stringing together of small organic molecules into long chain-like
  molecules called _polymers_.  The most important biological polymers are
  starches (polymers of sugars), proteins (polymers of amino acids), and
  DNA (polymers of nucleotides).  In another "evolution simulation"
  experiment, Sidney Fox produced protein-like molecules by heating
  pure-dry amino acids at high temperatures.  When this material was
  allowed to cool in water it formed small globules which he called
  "microspheres."  Although these microspheres are stone dead,
  evolutionists refer to them as "protocells," implying that they
  represent an early stage of living cells.  In fact, about the only
  similarity between microspheres and living cells is they are, as their
  name implies, small and spherical.

     The final stage of chemical evolution involves the chance
  transformation of organic molecules and polymers into the unfathomably
  complex machinery of living cells.  Here evolutionary speculation is so
  unrestrained by evidence, or even plausibility, that it fails to merit
  serious consideration.  The biochemist Dr. David Green pretty well
  summed it up when he said in his book _Molecular Insights into the Living
  Process_:

     "the macromolecule-to-cell transition is a jump of fantastic
     dimensions, which lies beyond the range of testable hypothesis.
     In this area all is conjecture.  The available facts do not
     provide a basis for postulating that cells arose on this planet."

  Evolutionists have tried to get around this problem by invoking long
  periods of time in the hope that, given enough time, virtually anything
  is possible -- except, of course, special creation.

     Now even some evolutionists fear that time and chance may not be the
  answer.  The Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA), in
  his book _Life Itself_, insists that the probability of life's chance
  origin simply defies calculation.  Crick, an atheist, says:

    "What is so frustrating for our present purpose is that it seems
    almost impossible to give any numerical value to the probability
    of what seems a rather unlikely sequence of events...  An honest
    man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only
    state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment
    to be almost a miracle."

  Incredibly, Crick concludes that the first living organisms on earth may
  have been "seeded" in our oceans by intelligent beings from another
  planet!

     Sir Fred Hoyle, the man who named the "Big Bang" theory, has recently
  concluded that the origin of life by chance is an absurd idea.  In his
  book _Evolution From Space_, Hoyle insists that it is obvious that the
  complexity of life demands an intelligent designer, possibly even
  (heaven forbid!) God.  According to Hoyle:

     "Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating
     at random is so utterly minuscule 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 a recent address at Cal Tech, Hoyle said that no amount of time now
  being considered by evolutionists is even remotely adequate to
  accomplish the formation of a higher living organism by chance.  Such an
  event, he said, would be comparable to the chance that "a tornado
  sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from materials
  therein"!

     Evolutionists, who must essentially invoke miracles without God, have
  no other choice than to believe in chance events so improbable they
  undermine the statistical foundation on which modern science rests.  In
  his book _Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to Creation of Life on Earth_,
  evolutionist Robert Shapiro abandons all skepticism and lamely argues:

     "One escape hatch yet exists for spontaneous generation.  Why need
     the event have been probable?  We can just stare at the odds, shrug,
     and note with thanks how lucky we were...  After all, improbable
     events occur all the time."

  Think of it, with an unquestioning faith like this in _God_, we
  Christians could move mountains!
  _______________________________________________________________________

  Dr. Menton received his Ph.D. in Biology from Brown University.  He has
  been involved in biomedical research and education for over 30 years.

  Dr. Menton is President of the Missouri Association for Creation, Inc.

                          Originally published in:
                            St. Louis MetroVoice
                               PO Box 220010
                            St. Louis, MO  63122
  _______________________________________________________________________

              Corrections and revisions have been made by the
                author from the original published essay.

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