The Origin of Life Itself

Introduction

So I want to start with the book of Psalms, chapter 8 tonight. If you want to be opening with me. We will begin each of these lessons with a passage of scripture that in itself teaches that we have every right from God’s own word to be having a series like this. Psalm 8. O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth. You who set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have ordained strength because of your enemies that you may silence the enemy and the avenger. When I consider your heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained. What is man that you are mindful of him, and the Son of Man that you visit him?

For you have made him a little lower than the angels, and you have crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him to have dominion over the works of your hands. You’ve put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, even the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea that pass through the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth. This passage, as well as a number of other ones in the New and Old Testament, speak to the fact that God has left testimony of Himself in the natural world. And from the natural world, we can come to understand that God is, and that He’s powerful, that He is divine.

And it is to that we turn our attention in this series. I repeat, for those of you who are Bible believers, the Bible itself teaches that the natural world gives a testimony of God of heaven. And it is to that testimony we’re looking in this series. Our title of the lesson tonight is The Origin of Life Itself. This lesson builds on the lesson from last night. If you were not here last night, the first thing a good teacher would do is review briefly the previous lesson. That is not possible tonight. You are allowed to get the tape or the DVD and review that lesson on your own. We must proceed on from here this evening. Also, I wanted to mention that we would like to conduct this lesson more like a lecture in a classroom than a sermon.

So I may very well be asking for feedback from the audience during this lesson. And we hope you won’t hesitate to give that as I call for it. For many of you to look at the heavens, or to look at a newborn baby, or to look at a tree, or for that matter, any living thing is sufficient for you to declare, oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is your name. And if that’s the case, if that’s sufficient for you to be a believer, then that’s just fine. But I must tell you, ever since Darwin, that’s not sufficient for an awful lot of people. In the face of what they believe is an almost infinite power of natural selection, acting upon natural variation, presented by nature and taught in every university in this country and around the world.

1. The Watchmaker and the Argument from Design

Many have come to believe that natural selection can take the place of God and can actually be the creator of what we see around us. And so I begin with you with a quote from a book called The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Included in my bibliography that is available to you, are a number of texts by evolutionists. I think it’s only fair to tell you some of the best material out there presented by evolutionists to support their view. The Blind Watchmaker, one of the bestsellers on this subject by Richard Dawkins is certainly one of those. So I begin with a quotation from the introduction, one of the first chapters in his book. The watchmaker of my title is borrowed from a famous treatise by the 18th century theologian William Paley.

Wonder how many in this audience have ever heard of William Paley? A few, maybe. If you had been in college in the early 1800s, no matter what university you were in, you would have studied, at least in the Western world, you would have studied William Paley’s book, Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, published first in 1802. William Paley’s Natural Theology. It was the standard textbook, examining nature to lead you to believe in God. Here’s what Mr. Dawkins has to say about that. He said, it’s the best known exposition of the argument from design, always the most influential of the arguments for the existence of a God. It is a book that I greatly admire, for in his own time its author succeeded in doing what I am struggling to do now.

He had a point to make.

Richard Dawkins, in the book The Blind Watchmaker, also has a point to make. He passionately believes it, and he spares no effort to ram it home clearly. Therefore, I make no apology, ladies and gentlemen, if on some occasions this evening I show some passion and try to ram home the points I want to make. That is certainly being done by those who firmly believe in the theory of evolution. This book is a classic illustration. I continue the quote. Paley had a proper reverence for the complexity of living things. And he saw that it demands a very special kind of explanation. The only thing Paley got wrong, admittedly, quite a big thing, was the explanation itself. He gave the traditional religious answer to this riddle. But he articulated it more clearly and convincingly than anyone had before.

The true explanation is utterly different, says Dawkins. And it had to wait for one of the most revolutionary thinkers of all time, Charles Darwin. Whereupon he goes on to a little explanation of what Paley would argue. So let me explain that to you briefly. William Paley would say, if you were in his natural theology class, if you were out walking on the heath in England, or in a forest, and you came across a rock, you examined the rock rather carefully. You might well say to yourself, isn’t it interesting what nature did? And wonder how long that rock’s been here. It might have been here for a long, long, long time. If, on the other hand, you came across an object that you picked up and it was a watch.

And you examined it very closely, and you saw all the inner linkings of the cogs and the wheels, and you saw it functioning in this marvelous way. Nobody would say, isn’t it interesting what nature did? And wonder whether that’s been here for a long, long period of time. No, what you would be doing is you would be searching for who made this thing. And so he proceeded in his book to explain the complexities of a watch. And then he made the argument we look at things in nature, and we see things much more complex than a watch ever thought of being.

Precisely the argument in Romans chapter 1, verse 20, isn’t it? By looking at the things that are made, you can come to see that there is God. That’s the argument from design, ladies and gentlemen. Richard or William Paley made that argument very beautifully in that book. Now I pick up my quote again with Richard Dawkins. Paley’s argument, made with passionate sincerity and is informed with the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong. The analogy between a telescope and an eye, between the watch and a living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight. He designs his cogs and his springs and plans their interconnections with a future purpose in his mind’s eye.

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind. It has no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. And thus the title of this book. And I will tell you, ladies and gentlemen, for the rest of the some 400 pages in this book, Richard Dawkins presents the theory that natural selection produced all the complexities that we observe in living things on this earth. With no purpose as the blind watchmaker.

And he believes it so passionately he spends 400 pages trying to convince you. And such is the commonly accepted view in our world. In the last 40 years, since the 1950s, I guess that’d be 50 years now, wouldn’t it? We have been privileged to be alive, ladies and gentlemen. As scientists have delved deep inside living things to the biochemical level of life, each step of the way revealing a more wonderful secret world, secret prior to this time, about how things really are made. We are privileged to see life today in a way nobody ever saw it before. Things which to Darwin were a black box in the 1860s, 1850s, have now been opened up to us. And so I’m recommending books to you. There’s a book called Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe that I highly recommend.

It contains a host of argumentation that when you look at the biochemistry of life, you see such complexity and interworkings that it shouts design. There’s some heavy chemistry in here. But he kind of sets those off so you can skip them and still get the point. But I highly recommend Darwin’s black box. While we’re introducing books, I brought a few more tonight. All of these I’m mentioning tonight are on the bibliography. Mere Creation, edited by William Dimsky. It’s a takeoff on mere Christianity. And it’s talking about what is the essence of the theory of creation if you’re going to look at it from a scientific standpoint. It’s excellent. It’s a series of treatises by several different writers. And I guess I’ll wait on those others until we get to the point where we need them.

2. Only Two Views on How Living Things Got Here

So you see, ladies and gentlemen, when you introduce a subject like this, obviously you can’t touch very much of it, so you try to get people to look into the material and gain a greater good. Well, my thesis today, in this lecture, is that when you look down inside living things and you examine what happens at the biochemical level, you open up a whole nother world of complexity, which should say to us, and it seems to me it’s difficult to get around. Something, someone made this. This did not come about by itself. Well, let’s take a look. We’ve said, there are only two views on how living things got here. It all boils down to two views. You either believe that we came about by natural causes, which is the evolutionary view, and the core idea of that is that life in all its forms emerged from simple substances by natural means.

You either believe we came about by natural means, or you believe there was an intelligent designer involved in the process somewhere. Those are the only alternatives. The creation view says life in all its forms is the result of intelligent shaping of matter. Had there not been intelligence acting on matter, you’d never get life. Now, those aren’t both true. You’re going to have to choose. And the basis for your choice should be what does the evidence of the natural world tell us? Is there a single tree of life, all living things are kin to one another, and they originated somewhere back in the distant past from natural means? Or is there a forest? We’ll look at the evidence of the natural world, the facts, and we have to ask ourselves which of these positions is more reasonable.

And that’s what we’re going to do again tonight. So here we are, the tree of life that I presented to you last night. And you’ll see at the base of this tree is the chemical origin of life. If you’re a pure evolutionist, you believe that living things came from non-living things by natural means. No God required at all. So I want to look at that piece right there tonight. You see, an evolutionist must explain first and foremost how did life get here in the first place. Then he’s got to explain once we got life, how do we get all these forms of life? We talked a little bit about that last night. Let’s talk tonight about the chemical origin of life. How’d life get here? I can tell you there’s not an evolutionist anywhere that believes life originated, boom, like you’re in the form you’re in.

3. Spontaneous Generation Defeated: Life Produces Life

No, everybody believes that the life that first originated was the simplest kind of life. Single celled organisms. You may not be aware that for generations, for centuries, men believed that life could arise from non life spontaneously. Abiogenesis, it’s called. Aristotle believed that life could be generated spontaneously from non-living things. And based on his authority, this was widely accepted through the 17th century. For example, some thought that geese were produced from certain fir trees and ocean water. You get them in close proximity, you get geese. Others thought that sheep were produced from melon trees.

And you know, we laugh at that in our age because the fact is, folks, nobody believes anymore that living things come from non-living things spontaneously. But I can tell you that took centuries for that notion to be well established. Because in the 17th century, men like Von Helmont actually ran some experiments to determine. You take some dirty clothes and some wheat, you throw it in a corner, and 21 days later, mice come out. Clearly, that experiment was uncontrolled, but Van Helmont concluded that mice were spontaneously generated from dirty shirts and wheat kernels. And there’s some evidence to support that. You leave them alone long enough, you’ll get mice. Little better controlled experiment done by Francesco Reddy some hundred years later, he did a little more controlled experiment.

Close up a chunk of meat in a container, leave this one with gauze on the top, and leave this one wide open. What he found out was the wide open one had lots of maggots growing on it. This one had a little bit of maggots, and this one had no maggots. Even though the same rotten meat was in there. And so he concluded that maybe there’s something about leaving that open to the air and letting flies get on it that has to do with where those maggots came from. The meat didn’t produce the maggots. The flies laid their eggs on there and produced the maggots. Well, you think that convinced everybody? Absolutely not. The theory of spontaneous generation was alive and well up until the 1800s.

You listening. And one of the reasons it continued to be accepted is while people would begin to think, well, you can’t get something as big as a maggot just being produced from non-living things. But what about things like you can see with a microscope, as was introduced by Lewin Hoke, Dutchman who introduced the first microscope and was the first one to look at a drop of water out of a river under a microscope and saw all kinds of little beasties floating around in there? Well, for some folks, that made them even stronger believers in spontaneous generation, because even if you can’t produce a mouse from non-living things, maybe you can produce one of those little single-celled organisms floating around in the water. Also led to more investigations.

And you may or may not be aware that Louis Pasteur in the 1800s is credited with discrediting the theory of spontaneous generation. And he did it by pasteurizing things. What do you know about pasteurizing? What do you do when you pasteurize something? You heat it up to a certain temperature, and what’s the purpose of heating it up? To kill everything living in it. We do that to milk, don’t we? I’ll tell you, I was in Romania. We went out and stayed with some folks out in the hinterlands of Romania, and it’s like going back a hundred years. And they brought us that morning for breakfast milk straight from the cow. We got sicker than a dog within the less less than a day. Pasteurized milk. I’ll take that every time.

But in the process of this pasteurization, he wasn’t just testing to see how you could get rid of living things. He was also testing to see if non-living things can produce living things. So he designed an experiment, and this is a long story, which I’m making very short, using a flask like this, and he put some meat juice down in that flask. You know what happens to meat juice if you just leave it sitting? It is swarming with living things. So what happened is he took the meat juice, he boiled it up to a certain temperature and killed every living thing in it, and then he left it sitting there. And he found it swarming with living things after a very short time. Well, that would support the idea of spontaneous generation.

But Pasteur did not believe that the non-living meat juice was producing living things. He thought something else was going on. So he decided I’m going to close that off from the atmosphere, boil it first, get rid of all living things, and then close it off from the atmosphere and let it sit. Folks, he let it sit for a long, long time and it never produced anything living. Even though it was the same meat juice. See what else I’ve said here. Alright. You know what the criticism was? The critics who believed in spontaneous generation said, that’s no fair. You’ve closed off the air. And so you have to have air, or else it can’t produce living things. So, Pasteur designed this flask. Now you can’t see it very well, but it’s open to the air way over here, but it’s got this swan neck.

So he boiled the solution, he left it open to the air. It has this swan neck in it, so anything in the air that might fall down in here gets caught in the neck up here. You with me? So it was open to the air, but the particles in the air couldn’t get down into juice. The flask will remain free of organisms for about a year and a half. This spelled the downfall of spontaneous generation in the middle 1800s. Pasteur’s experiments took place, ladies and gentlemen, at about the same time in history that this book was written. Darwin’s Origin of the Species. This was first published in 1859. Pasteur was doing his experiments right about that same time. And while Darwin was coming up with a theory that said all living things come from a common ancestry by natural selection, and he even suggested in one of his books, not this one, that in some warm little pond somewhere the chemicals got together and produced something living.

At that same time, Pasteur was demonstrating once and for all that non living things do not produce living things. Life produces life.

4. Life Emerges from the Soup: A Theory from Thin Air

So in the middle 1800s, Pasteur’s experiments left an evolutionist with no mechanism by which life comes from non-life. Spontaneous generation essentially was defeated. So what happens? Wait a while. And in the early 1900s, Alexander O’Parin from Russia, J.B. S. Haldane from the greater Great Britain, suggested that the environment and circumstances were different in the early earth than they are now. And therefore, at that time you could have spontaneous generation, but now you can’t. Under those different conditions, they believed life could evolve from non-life, but not so now. On what basis did they make that decision? They made it on the basis of the fact that everybody knows non-living things don’t produce living things now under present conditions. Therefore, because they were so convinced that it must have happened, there had to be different conditions.

Were there abundance evidences for that? Absolutely. It was a theory made up out of thin air. Let me see if I can explain the theory to you. Which introduces this book, The Threat of Life by Richard Lewin, put out by the Smithsonian Institute. Thoroughly evolutionary from one end to the other. But he has a chapter in here entitled, can you see it up front here? Read it out loud. Can you see it? You can’t see it well enough. Alright, I’ll read it. Life Emerges from the Soup. That’s the title of this chapter. In this book written for the public. So I want to read you just a little section in here in this book written for you to tell you where you came from. The origin of early life can be broken down into five stages.

First, the formation of the earth from material spinning in the primordial solar system. So the earth was formed from spinning material. That’s first. Second, the synthesis of the most simple chemicals such as amino acids, phosphates, and sugars that are used in living organisms. Simple organisms were formed first. Third, the linking together of these individual building blocks into long chains. Fourth, the assembly from the primordial soup of minuscule protoorganisms. And last, the origin of a mechanism by which they could reproduce themselves. So in those five stages, that’s how life originated on Earth. So says Dr. Lewin. Let me explain that to you a little further because this has come to be the standard explanation of how you got here. How the simplest life forms got here. You see the raw materials up here on this chart?

Here’s my question for you. Our present atmosphere consists of what kind of gases? Who can help me? It’s mostly nitrogen, isn’t it? Anybody remember the percentage?

Roughly 80% nitrogen. And how much oxygen? Roughly 20%. Now there’s a few percentage points of some other gases. But it’s mostly nitrogen and oxygen. Ladies and gentlemen, that kind of an atmosphere is called an oxidizing atmosphere. And everybody knows if you have that much oxygen around, you’ll never produce life from non-life. Therefore, Haldane and O’Parin said that’s not the way it was in the early Earth. They said instead the early Earth had ammonia, methane, hydrogen, water vapor, and carbon dioxide. That was what the atmosphere was like in the early Earth. Did they have hard evidence to demonstrate that? No, they did not. But they proposed it anyway. Notice there’s no free oxygen anywhere in there. That’s a reducing atmosphere, and they said under those conditions, here’s some things that could have happened.

You add to that a source of energy like lightning or ultraviolet radiation from the sun, and you can then produce the simple building blocks of life, amino acids and sugars. They’ll happen spontaneously. Once you get those, and they fall down into the ocean, and they start getting more and more of them, so the concentration is greater and greater, they start bumping together, and they eventually form chains, polypeptides and polynucleotides, long chains of molecules.

And in that soup, you start clumping together, forming microspheres and coacervates, little simple precursors. And from those, with their completed parts, the proteins, the enzymes, and the nucleic acids, you eventually get the first living cell. Nature did it by itself. And once, ladies and gentlemen, you get the first living cell, all other life forms evolve from it by natural selection. That’s the theory. Now you may notice when I read that book, he said the origin of early life can be broken down into five steps. Can you imagine the audacity? He didn’t say this is our best theory. He said, This is how it happened. It can be broken down into five stages. I want to tell you that kind of statement in a book written for the public about supposed science makes me furious.

Because there isn’t one step in that process that can be well certified. And that is well documented. In fact, if you read this book by Faxton Bradley and Olson, called The Mystery of Life’s Origins, Reassessing Current Theories, it goes through every major theory about how life arose by spontaneous generation. And it shows the flaws from one end to the other with them all. From a scientific perspective, not quoting scripture. Obviously, I don’t have time to do that tonight, but I do want to show you this. Because I was in college, high school and college in the late 50s and early 60s. And I can tell you it was an exciting time in a lot of ways. A lot of fascinating things were happening in the 50s and early 60s in the realm of science.

5. Miller’s Experiment Never Got Past the Building Blocks

And here’s one in particular. This one, Stanley Miller was a student of Harold Urey in the University of Chicago. And Stanley Miller, as a graduate student, decided he was going to see if he could set up a test to see if the O’Paran Haldane hypothesis might work. In other words, could we set up a scenario where maybe some of those steps in that process took place? So he designed this experiment, which I’m going to describe to you, the origin of life apparatus by Stanley Miller. In 1953, he came up with the results I’m talking about. Okay, look at this thing with me. See right here is a flask containing water, which is being boiled. This is a heater down here. It’s heating this water, so you get water vapor up here in this chamber.

Through this stopcock here, you can also put in other gases. Guess what gases he put in there? The same ones Haldane said you should put in there ammonia, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and water vapor was already there. So he entered all those gases into this chamber. And notice there are two electrodes immersed in that chamber, sticking down in there, connected to an electrical device down here that can spark them. What do you think that was supposed to be? Lightning. And this was supposed to be the atmosphere. Lightning. And whatever’s produced up here falls down through this condenser into the ocean. See this ocean down here? And it collects down here in the ocean. The gases bubble on through and recycle, so you’ve got this constantly cycling system.

It’s a closed system. Well, Stanley Miller came up with this experiment. And he turned it on. And he let it run for 21 to 30 days by itself. No human interference. Then he pulled out the stuff out of the ocean here. He found a sludge like material down here, which he took to the lab and he investigated what was in that sludge. And what he found were certain key molecules in here. And I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that among those molecules that he discovered were a number of the amino acids, which are the building blocks for proteins in every living thing. And when I was in the university at Florida State University studying science, believe me, Stanley Miller’s experiment was being trumpeted as one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of science to show us that non life can really produce life.

And they would say to us students, you can go in the lab and do this yourself. All you have to do is put the right gases in here, spark it with electricity, and it’ll produce amino acids all by itself. Not only that, in the 10 years since 1953, when I started into college, I was actually at Florida State in 65 to 67, so it’d been 12 years to 14 years. They had run this experiment a thousand times under varying conditions. And by that time, ladies and gentlemen, they had not only found amino acids down here, but they had found some of the common sugars that form the basis for other things that are necessary for life. So you see, Miller’s experiment demonstrated that non-living matter, like ammonia and hydrogen, simple substances, by being sparked under certain conditions, will produce the building blocks of life by themselves.

You don’t need God. Nature will do it by itself. And other fellows like professors at the University of Miami, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, and other universities around the world were testing. Now, once you get this building block stuff, can you make it form longer chains? And as a matter of fact, you can. Now you have to have a little human interference in that case. But there were all kinds of signs that indicated from the scientific investigations that life could in fact have formed from non life under different conditions. And the reason I’m bringing this up, especially for you young people, you’re going to get in college and you’re going to face things from your professors that you don’t have a clue how to answer and how to handle, and it can shake you to your boots.

It did me. I didn’t know how to answer this stuff. And I began to wonder the things that I’ve been taught since I was a child that God created life. Maybe God wasn’t necessary to create life. Maybe nature can do it by itself. Here’s what I’m trying to tell you, young people. If you face something for which you don’t know the answer, and it’s beginning to shake your faith, just wait a while. Give it some time. Mull it over. Learn more deeply what this is all about. Don’t take what’s on the surface. And what you’ll find out, I believe, is the same thing I’ve experienced. Here I am 30, 40 years later. And what we’ve learned about Miller’s experiment, is that in this whole series of stages, you know, he had the gases and he had the lightning source, and he got these building blocks right here.

Here we are 50 years later. Miller’s experiment has been run so many times you can’t even count it. And they’ve never gotten anything past the simple building blocks. And what we’ve learned since then, is that the fact that those simple building blocks are relatively easy to make given certain conditions, is light years from producing the single cell.

And all of these things in between here that you’ve got to do to get to this, they are so massively complex and involved. We’re not anywhere close, ladies and gentlemen. And all those promising things that my teacher trumpeted us, just give us a few years and we’ll explain all this. You know where we are 50 years later? We’re farther from knowing how life got started, supposedly than we were 50 years ago. By far, because we found out how much more complex it is than we ever dreamed. And I say to you again, you check out this book, and you’ll see every step of that process has flaws in it that say it’s not a natural process. It requires human interference to make it. So here’s what Fred Hoyle says about it.

In short, there’s not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on earth. So why do biologists indulge in such unsubstantiated fantasies in order to deny what is so patently obvious that the 200,000 amino acid changed, and hence life did not appear by chance. Fred Hoyle is not a Christian, he’s not a Bible believer, but he recognizes the complexity of life. It did not come about by natural means.

So what is life like as we know it? Well, I have another little book here. It’s called Life Itself.