Pssst! Don't tell the creationists, but scientists don't have a clue how life began

Exactly 20 years ago, I wrote an article for Scientific American that, in draft form, had the headline above. My editor nixed it, so we went with something less dramatic: "In the Beginning…: Scientists are having a hard time agreeing on when, where and—most important—how life first emerged on the earth." That editor is gone now, so I get to use my old headline, which is even more apt today.

Dennis Overbye just wrote a status report for The New York Times on research into life's origin, based on a conference on the topic at Arizona State University. Geologists, chemists, astronomers and biologists are as stumped as ever by the riddle of life.

After its formation 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was bombarded for millions of years by huge meteorites, which would have wiped out any fledgling organisms. Researchers have found evidence of microbial life dating back 3.5 billion years ago, suggesting that life emerged fairly quickly—"like Athena springing from the head of Zeus," as one scientist quoted by Overbye put it. But how exactly did chemistry first make the transition to biology?

As recently as the middle of the 20th century, many scientists thought that the first organisms were made of self-replicating proteins. After Francis Crick and James Watson showed that DNA is the basis for genetic transmission in the 1950s, many researchers began to favor nucleic acids over proteins as the ur-molecules. But there was a major hitch in this scenario. DNA can make neither proteins nor copies of itself without the help of catalytic proteins called enzymes. This fact turned the origin of life into a classic chicken-or-egg puzzle: Which came first, proteins or DNA?

RNA, DNA's helpmate, remains the most popular answer to this conundrum, just as it was when I wrote "In the Beginning…" Certain forms of RNA can act as their own enzymes, snipping themselves in two and splicing themselves back together again. If RNA could act as an enzyme, then it might be able to replicate itself without help from proteins. RNA could serve as gene and catalyst, egg and chicken.

But the "RNA-world" hypothesis remains problematic. RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize under the best of circumstances, in a laboratory, let alone under plausible prebiotic conditions. Once RNA is synthesized, it can make new copies of itself only with a great deal of chemical coaxing from the scientist. Overbye notes that "even if RNA did appear naturally, the odds that it would happen in the right sequence to drive Darwinian evolution seem small."

The RNA world is so dissatisfying that some frustrated scientists are resorting to much more far out—literally—speculation. The most startling revelation in Overbye's article is that scientists have resuscitated a proposal once floated by Crick. Dissatisfied with conventional theories of life's beginning, Crick conjectured that aliens came to Earth in a spaceship and planted the seeds of life here billions of years ago. This notion is called directed panspermia. In less dramatic versions of panspermia, microbes arrived on our planet via asteroids, comets or meteorites, or drifted down like confetti.

One enormous change in the past two decades in the quest to understand our origins—which Overbye also reported on recently—is that astronomers have identified more than 1,000 possible planets orbiting other stars. Some seem to be in the "Goldilocks" zone, neither too far nor too close to their respective stars for life as we know it to prosper. Perhaps we are descended from life that emerged on one of those planets.

Of course, panspermia theories merely push the problem of life's origin into outer space. If life didn’t begin here, how did it begin out there? Creationists are no doubt thrilled that origin-of-life research has reached such an impasse (see for example the screed "Darwinism Refuted," which cites my 1991 article), but they shouldn't be. Their explanations suffer from the same flaw: What created the divine Creator? And at least scientists are making an honest effort to solve life's mystery instead of blaming it all on God.

The answer to that question is sadly unknowable, until such time as you or I are in a position to ask, and said divine being is inclined to answer.

It’s ironic...I was raised Catholic, broke from the church, and live much of my young adulthood in a state best described as “aloof agnoticism.”

As I’ve gotten older, and more fascinated by science, science continually brings me back to God.

Scientists are not stupid people, but they are flawed the same as all of us. Some become partial to a theory and tend to discard opposing views the same way some politicians become blind to evidence that their position is incorrect on an issue.

That said, could God have made the Earth pre-aged to 4.3 billion years? Sure, in an universe where God makes all the rules, He can do whatever he wants, but that said...

I personally don’t believe he did.

I believe the Big Bang (or something very like it) happened. The evidence is huge in support of it. We see the other galaxies speeding away from us like ripples on a pond, and extrapolating back 14 billion years, they all converge on a single point.

For that reason, I also believe it’s likely that the Earth is 4.3 billion years old and accreted from a protoplanetary disk of leftover dust and gas from the Sun’s formation, which in turn was made possible by a supermassive star exploding and providing the metal-rich dust which are the building blocks of our solar system.

That aside, I’m also unshakeably convinced that it all did not just “happen.” The Big Bang is the only evidenced example of the creation of something from nothing in the history of the Universe, and if you need any conviction on how unlikely it was for the conditions for life to just happen on Earth, I’d heartily recommend “Rare Earth” by Brownlee and Ward...Two scientists who look at how many stars had to line up for humanity to even have a home.

This whole rambling response is a roundabout way of getting to your answer - Whatever God is, He was before the Big Bang. To me, that means that if the Big Bang was His ultimate act of Creation, He is external to our universe or above it, or outside it, much as the programmer of a video game created the code and the rules by which the game is played...He can watch and see how his instructions are carried out and how his program runs. He can even intervene and change the rules when he sees fit, but nothing that happens in that game affects him - He is outside of it, yet he is its creator.

To me, the universe is God’s will translated into the laws of physics - His programming language, most of which is still a mystery to us. We simply do not have any means available to us to speculate on how He came to be, what His nature is, or how whatever reality He inhabits compares to our own. We can simply gather information, and try determine for ourselves if Life, the Universe, and Everything spontaneously exploded from a singularity and spawned sentient life...Or the same thing happened under the thoughtful supervision of Something Greater.

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