In the 1974 Mel Brook’s movie Young Frankenstein, there is a scene in which Gene Wilder, playing the part of Dr. Frederick von Frankenstein (pronounced “Fronk-en-shteen”), is about to raise his monster from the dead.
Amidst the classical laboratory equipment and electrical arc flashes, Dr. Frankenstein starts loudly proclaiming.
“Life! Life! Do you hear me! Give my creation, Life! ”
As his monster slowly regains life.
If only the creation of life was this easy…
We are faced with only two possibilities for the creation of life.
- Materialist View — Life arose from chance and accident using physics and chemistry.
- Theist View — Life was designed and created by an incomprehensible creator some might call God.
The first possibility is the only one you have if you do not have a creator. Without a creator or God, you must explain the beginning of life through chance, physics, and the accidental mixing of chemicals. It is all you can use. This is called abiogenesis, which is the creation of life from inorganic substances.
Materialist experiments in abiogenesis.
In the 1920’s scientists A. I. Oparin and J. B. S. Haldan speculated that the prebiotic earth’s atmosphere could have contained methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor among other gases. When this primeval mix of gases was charged with energy the mixture could produce organic molecules that would combine to form life.
Using this information, graduate student Stanley Miller under the direction of his Ph.D. Adviser Harold Urey published the results of a famous experiment in 1953. Under laboratory conditions, they circulated steam from boiling water in a mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen past an electrical spark discharge. The experiment produced a deep red substance at the bottom of the collection apparatus that was then analyzed. In that residue, the amino acids glycine, α-alanine and β-alanine were identified along with possible amounts of aspartic acid and α-aminobutyric acid. [1]
Later, the early earth atmosphere that Miller and Urey used in the experiment was found to be incorrect and a more volcanic mix of gases containing water vapor, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen was favored. Experiments that were conducted with this revised gas combination could only produce small quantities of a simple amino acid and only when hydrogen was introduced in an unnatural amount.
Along with the atmospheric gas combination used the Miller-Urey experiment has other issues. In the original experiment, there were molecules of cyanide and formaldehyde produced, both of which are very toxic to living organisms. In 2015, a group of researchers proved that the E. Coli bacteria could live in the residue left behind from the Miller-Urey experiment; but only after the cyanide and formaldehyde were removed from the mixture. [2]
There is a facet of this experiment that is worth noting. Throughout the whole history of this experiment there has been the input of intelligence. This is because the chemicals, equipment, laboratory, and the controlled experimental conditions were influenced by intelligence ether by the chemical company employees or the scientists themselves.
The irony of scientists intelligently producing an experiment to disprove the involvement of intelligence in the origins of life is breathtaking arrogance.
If the experiment was to be reproduced more accurately, it should have been conducted under a rock out in the elements.
Yet, the Miller-Urey experiment is upheld as the achievement in the quest for abiogenesis and is in student textbooks to this day. It is used as the pivotal experiment in the origin of life studies and is held up as one as the proof that a creator or God was not involved in the creation of life.
The overwhelming problem of the interactome.
The leap of faith that abiogenesis researchers must make to bridge the chasm between the Miller-Urey experiment and the creation of a functioning living cell de novo is many orders of magnitude larger than the faith you need to believe in a creator God. How much? You ask? Let’s look further into the creation of even the simplest of cells. It is not enough to just assemble the molecular constituents of the cell, that will not get you to life. Life is maintained in that cell with a vast array of molecular interactions. This problem was even addressed by the atheist Richard Dawkins. In his book The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, Dawkins describes the problem this way:
“Of course, there are additional complicating factors such as alternative splicing, post-translational modifications, non-pairwise macromolecular interactions, incorrect complex formation that is adventitiously stable, and so forth. However, even neglecting such complications, the numbers preclude formation of a functional interactome by trial and error complex formation within any meaningful span of time. This numerical exercise… is tantamount to a proof that the cell does not organize by random collisions of its interacting constituents.” [3]
If the interactions are the key to the ability to maintain life in the cell and if they are purely unguided and random as scientific materialism must dictate, then the functional interactions of the cell can be calculated mathematically. This is precisely the calculations that were performed by Peter Tompa and George D. Rose. They looked at the interactions in a cells interactome, this consists of all the proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, metal ion cofactors, and other molecular constituents in the cell. They write about this complexity in their paper titled, The Levinthal Paradox of the Interactome:
“Unlike protein folding, self-assembly of the interactome has not yet prompted such widespread attention, and for understandable reasons. It is a problem of bewildering complexity… Where does one begin? Our goal here is to show that assembly of the interactome in biological real-time is analogous to folding in that the functional state is selected from a staggering number of useless or potentially deleterious alternatives.” [4]
The cell that was examined was a yeast cell. The cell has approximately 4,500 proteins, and each protein has a possibility of a certain amount of interactions with other proteins. The smaller the number of proteins the less the number of interactions (i.e. For 3 proteins the possible interactions are 2).
However, as the number of proteins goes up, the number of possible interactions climbs at an increasing rate. At 20 proteins you are already at 654,729,075 possible interactions. Remember, that out of the possible interactions only a very small percentage is helpful to the cell, the vast number will kill the cell.
Once the cell is dead, there is no reviving it and the whole organism suffers and possibly dies too.
So, for the possible 4,500 proteins in the paper the number of possible interactions was calculated to be 10^7.9 x 10¹⁰). This is a completely incomprehensible number of totally unguided mechanical and chemical reactions that any number of them could cause the death of the cell. This is a huge problem for the materialist argument for the creation of life from the primordial chemical soup. Tompa and Rose allude to this problem in the paper:
“Perhaps the most profound conclusion to be drawn from our calculations of combinatorial complexity is that the emergent interactome could not have self-organized spontaneously from its isolated protein components. Rather, it attains its functional state by templating the interactome of a mother cell and maintains that state by a continuous expenditure of energy. In the absence of a prior framework of existing interactions, it is far more likely that combined cellular constituents would end up in a non-functional, aggregated state, one incompatible with life.” [5]
The calculations for interactions in the interactome were for just one cell. Organisms contain many more cells than just one, this only compounds the problem. Well, what about if we have enough time, then it could happen? If you take the smallest unit of time called the Planck second, which is 5.39 x 10–⁴⁴ of a second and calculate the total possible Planck seconds since the beginning of the universe you have approximately 1.86 x 10⁴³ Planck seconds.
You can only have one interaction per Planck second, there is not enough time for all the possible interactions to find the useful ones. There is no way out of this problem for the materialist.
Dawkins admits to this problem (bold type is added):
“It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living — flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on. But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.” [6]
Information is essential for life.
A second problem in the materialist’s view of the origin of life is the problem of information, specifically information transfer. When an architect or engineer designs something they often produce a set of drawings or instructions that pass information to a person that will build it. Without those instructions, the object has little chance of being built correctly. If the instructions where nonsense and nothing but random marks on the paper the object will not be built. This necessitates that the instructions for assembly must contain usable and relevant information; usable in the fact that it is in a form that can be interpreted and relevant in that it is the right information at the right time.
DNA is the molecule that is the instructional blueprint for the assembly of proteins that are the building blocks for all cells. It is a molecule that is formed by four distinct bases: adenine A, cytosine C, guanine G, and thymine T. The bases act as letters in a four-letter alphabet transferring information to build a specific protein. The bases are assembled into a long strand that we know as the DNA double helix.
DNA must be encoded with the right usable information that can be interpreted by the cellular machinery to build proteins. The information must have the correct decoding mechanisms for it to be useful in the production of proteins. The gap from information carrier in this case DNA, to the decoder to produce proteins, you must have a mind that facilitates the protocol of the information transfer. Otherwise, you have two information systems that are blindly working on opposite ends of the information gap. The odds of DNA containing the right information at the same time as the decoding mechanism would be unfathomable if there were no intellectual coordination involved and we only had chance and materialism to work with. This information transfer strongly infers the existence of a highly intelligent mind that has unfathomable creative abilities.
Information comes from “Mind”.
The creation of life thru abiogenesis has been and always will be problematic for the materialist viewpoint. The early experiments that established the possibility of life arising from random chemicals are riddled with problems.
Despite the problems, they are still held up as the paragons of abiogenesis and proof that life arose from a primordial goo and not a Creator God. This is intellectual fraud. The mathematics does not support the random creation of life from the goo. The information contained in DNA also proves extremely problematic to the materialist viewpoint.
The materialist is left with the conundrum of information organizing itself, forming a code, sending itself, decoding itself, and then building proteins from the original coded information, all by sheer dumb luck…
Imagine that…
End Notes
- Miller, Stanley L. “A Production of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions.” Science, vol. 117, no. 3046, 1953, pp. 528–529., https://doi.org/10.1126/science.117.3046.528.
- Xie, Xueshu, et al. “Primordial Soup Was Edible: Abiotically Produced Miller-Urey Mixture Supports Bacterial Growth.” Scientific Reports, vol. 5, no. 1, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14338.
- Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.
- Tompa, Peter, and George D. Rose. “The Levinthal Paradox of the Interactome.” Protein Science, vol. 20, no. 12, 2011, pp. 2074–2079., https://doi.org/10.1002/pro.747.
- Ibid
- Dawkins, 2015.