Refining the Origin of Life Argument

One of the most popular arguments for the existence of God involves the complexities of life itself, implying something so intricate could never be the product of natural causes. A supernatural intelligence would be required to form together even the basic living cell, with its membrane, cytoplasm, nucleus, and billions of lines of coding. Requiring over ten thousand chemical reactions each second just to stay alive, the cell is truly a remarkable feat of engineering. And to be fair, to date scientists really don’t know how it originated, though there are plenty of theories.

However, in The Language of God, geneticist Francis Collins warns that Christians should not make this a foundational argument for theism, as it comes dangerously close to committing a “god-of-the-gaps” fallacy. This occurs when we run across a scientific mystery and label God as the explanation. Granted, it’s an easy trap that I’ve fallen into many times myself. We should be cautious when filling a gap in scientific knowledge with God, not just because the explanation could some day be found, but because it diminishes the awesome power of God Himself. The Lord deserves credit for creating everything, whether through miraculous or natural means, and is above being used as filler for unsolved mysteries.

But I still think the examining the origin of life can make a very strong argument for God, if in need of serious clarification (and skeptics do have good counter-arguments that we’ll address in a little bit). I have a plethora of creationist books, including the aforementioned Language of God, The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel, God’s Crime Scene by J. Warner Wallace, and Darwinism Under the Microscope by James Gills and Tom Woodward (there’s more, but these four have the most relevant information to the point I’m trying to make). All of them have at least one chapter on the intricacies of the cell, which is a marvel to behold.

The typical atheist counter I’ve seen is that you can’t compare modern and primitive life. Every one of these books fails to mention that their diagrams are of a typical cell from today; but if Darwinian evolution is true (which the skeptics’ a priori assumption), these evolved from a much simpler primordial structure that looked very different.

And they aren’t wrong. Cellular structure falls into two categories: Eukaryotes, in which the cell contains a nucleus, and prokaryotes, which do not. Prokaryotes can also be divided into two categories, bacteria and archaea.

The most complex life forms, including the entire plant and animal kingdoms, are eukaryotes. Creationists who point to the amazing complexity of life often don’t mention that they’re specifically referring to a eukaryotic cell. Now, I admit that I haven’t read every book on intelligent design out there, so there could well be one that differentiates eukaryotes and prokaryotes. But from the plethora of books that I do own, I can’t find any reference to even those terms.

Skeptics who call us out for this are correct that the geologic record shows that prokaryotes came first. The oldest actual fossils, which are about three billion years old, are called stromatolites; these were large colonies of cyanobacteria that populated the shallow waters of early earth (believe it or not, stromatolites still exist). There is some evidence, however, of life existing almost four billion years ago, traces of carbon that single-cell life forms are known to leave behind, though this is far from conclusive.

Single-cell eukaryotes, on the other hand, don’t appear until just over two billion years ago, and it would still be another five hundred million years after that before the first multicellular organisms appeared. Since prokaryotes are simpler than eukaryotes, and archaea are must simpler than bacteria, we can almost be certain that archaea were the first life on Earth.

The transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes is called endosymbiosis, though the numerous speculations on how this happened are still very much theoretical. Nevertheless, the question we should ask is whether or not the simplest prokaryotic cells require a designer.

In 1953, Stanley Miller conducted the now-famous “Miller-Urey” experiment, running an electrical charge through warm water under a vapor rich with H2, CH4, and NH3, producing a blob of organic compounds and amino acids. The thinking was that Miller had mimicked the atmosphere of early earth (the vapor) and by zapping electricity in water, showed that the building blocks of early life might have come into existing via a lightening strike.

The Miller-Urey experiment has undergone overwhelming criticism since, and scientists do know today that it doesn’t explain much; the atmosphere of early Earth was more than likely rich with CO2 and N2 instead. Nevertheless, it sparked the beginning of a new scientific field called abiogenesis.

If it sounds like I’m retreating too far from divine creation, I want to point out that in the 66 years since the Miller-Urey experiment, research in abiogenesis has ended up with more questions than answers. We know that carbon is the base-molecule of all living things, and that ATP is the power-source of each chemical reaction. But the deeper questions of how and why are still a mystery, perhaps one that science alone simply isn’t capable of answering.

For example, the basic instructions of life, DNA, is still far-too complex to have come into existence by itself. With this in mind, many scientists have theorized that RNA came first, as it is smaller and simpler (composed of a single instead of a double strand) while serving the same function (carrying information), but is also able to catalyze chemical reactions. But this theoretical RNA-world also has immense problems, not the least of which is that the building blocks of RNA have never been produced in any Miller-Urey type experiment. We also have a classic “chicken-and-egg” problem in the relationship between RNA and DNA: proteins are required to make ribosome machines; but ribosome machines are required to make proteins.

Of course, I’m no expert, so let me try to cite one. A friend of mine, Dr. Sy Garte, biochemist and former atheist, now Christian, recently wrote an interesting article on his blog, The Book of Works, pointing out another issue with evolution of early life (the link is below for further reading).

According to Dr. Garte, the problem that doesn’t get much attention is replication (different from reproduction). Replication is the copying of an organism’s gene code with a high enough accuracy that the offspring will inherit traits. Of course an exact copy would make its offsprings clones, so the accuracy rate needs to be more than the “error catastrophe” low percentage without being too high, somewhere in a comfortable zone. The story of life from the beginning indicates organisms have always had remarkably high replication abilities, which may be as much a mystery to science as the origin of life itself.

For advanced life, which can have billions of base codes in their genomes, enzymatic processes are in place to keep the replication, transcription and transition rates at an ideal level. But all of these processes would have had to evolve, so we shouldn’t expect them in the earliest primitive life forms. Even in the hypothetical RNA-world, with each proto-organism composed of only 50 base genomes, replication would require a 98% replication rate. No current proposed evolutionary mechanisms can come close to explaining what we see in the geologic record, making not just life’s appearance, but what happened next, all the more amazing.

If you boiled life down to its basic chemical composition, as information-rich molecules bonding together in primordial oceans absorbing ionized hydrogen from geothermal vents, you still have maddening philosophical questions. Let’s posit that life occurred naturally via chemical interactions that started slow but sped up and grew. The problem is this this would take infinitely longer than what happened; literally as soon as the earth cooled at the end of the Hadian period, life seems to have appeared and rapidly started spreading; and we still haven’t even addressed why information-rich molecules would try to resist entropy, care so much about their own survival, and desire to reproduce themselves in the first place.

There are two ways we could look at this. On the one hand, it’s tempting to think that science will inevitably triumph on this issue. We’ve learned a great deal about the chemical composition of life since the Miller-Urey experiment. It almost looks like those who insist life must have been an act of divine creation are standing on a rock with the floodwaters of science inevitably rising to close over them. On the other hand, the huge gaps in our knowledge and our inability to explain not just how, but why life came into existence and became so complex so quickly could be viewed as an insurmountable obstacle.

In the end, I agree with Dr. Collins that whether or not life has a supernatural origin is actually beside the point. It wouldn’t answer even bigger, more pressing questions about the beginning of the universe itself and the extraordinary degree of cosmological fine-tuning to make a suitable planet for life in the first place, hundreds of layers of improbability stacked onto each other in ways we’re just now discovering. Furthermore, we need to adjust our definitions of creation; atheists and theists alike tend to assume that if there’s a natural explanation, God didn’t do it, relegating God to merely supernatural acts. This is wrong. All natural laws have a divine source, so anything that happens through scientifically explainable causes is still part of His creation plan. So if life does have a supernatural origin, great; and if it came into existence through some still-undiscovered natural phenomena, great; there is still a God either way.

Sources:

-Garte, Sy. “Replication and Evolution.” Thebookofworks.com. July 9, 2019. Accessed July 22, 2019. https://thebookofworks.com/2019/07/09/replication-and-evolution
-Collins, Francis. The Language of God. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 2006, pages 88-93.
-Campbell, Neil; Reece, Jane; Taylor, Martha; Simon, Eric; Dickey; Jean. Biology: Concepts and Connections (Sixth Edition). Benjamin Cummings, San Francisco, CA, 2009, pages 4, 6, 295, 297, 318-319.
-Wallace, J. Warner. God’s Crime Scene. David C Cook, Colorado Springs, CO, 2015, pages 71-79.
-Strobel, Lee. The Case for a Creator. Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004, pages 226-235.
-Gills, James and Woodward, Tom. Darwinism Under the Microscope. Charisma House, Lake Mary, FL, 2002, pages 43-46.

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I like the old joke about a group of scientists telling God they can make a better man than He did. God says, “You’re on”. One of the scientists tells another, “Go get a bucket of dirt.” God says, “No, no. Make your own dirt.”

“proteins are required to make ribosome machines”

No.

Peptidyl transferase activity is in the ribosomal RNA.

Ribosomal proteins are not necessary.

Thanks for posting this.

It's a really excellent summary of the development of cells and complex life forms.

I am not a religious person, but I do love great mystery stories, and the origin of life is certainly one of them.

Just in the last few years, laser light flash speeds and nano-cameras have reached a point where many basic molecular processes can be photographed in real time.

Unfortunately, it is much more difficult to use those photographic processes in organic chemistry because the process usually kills the cell or the molecule they are trying to study.

"...atheists and theists alike tend to assume that if there’s a natural explanation, God didn’t do it, relegating God to merely supernatural acts.
This is wrong.
All natural laws have a divine source, so anything that happens through scientifically explainable causes is still part of His creation plan.
So if life does have a supernatural origin, great; and if it came into existence through some still-undiscovered natural phenomena, great; there is still a God either way."

That is a key point that many, if not most, cannot quite get their minds around.

“Are you saying that ribosomes are not made out of proteins?”

No. Not sure why you would think that.

I’m saying ribosomal proteins are not the catalytic component of a ribosome.

rRNA carries out the peptidyl transferase activity and that the ribosomal proteins are not necessary for the reaction.

I’m pointing out there is not a chicken and egg problem.

Re: Chicken v. Egg

I think the author was making the point that ribosomes are constructed of proteins.

Therefore, the obvious question - if ribosomes are the protein factory in our cells, where do (or did) the proteins that make up the ribosome organelle come from?

I know.

But he’s wrong in thinking the proteins in ribosomes make the proteins.

Ribosomes are mainly RNA.

The RNA makes the protein.

RNA catalyzes the reaction that joins the amino acids.

All the proteins of a bacterial ribosome can be carefully removed and the ribosome still catalyzes the reaction.

Re: All the proteins of a bacterial ribosome can be carefully removed and the ribosome still catalyzes the reaction.

Interesting...

But, not an obvious fact that a science writer and his non-scientist readers should be expected to know about.

Stephen Meyer is cited and interviewed in a lot of the books I’ve read, and I’ve listened to him on podcasts and interviews. But I don’t have any actual books he’s written (yet), but I will add that one to my reading list. I’ve heard of it.

I am not a religious person, but I do love great mystery stories, and the origin of life is certainly one of them.

Thank you! I agree that abiogenesis is interesting to look into, and even when we have natural explanations, it's still hard for our minds to comprehend just how all these processes came together in such perfection.

And like I said, the more we discovery, the more questions pop up.

Just in the last few years, laser light flash speeds and nano-cameras have reached a point where many basic molecular processes can be photographed in real time.

Case in point. For the life of me, there's some photographs I can't imagine how we obtain. (Remember the "Miracle of Life" video from high school reproduction class?)

Now compare that to what we didn't know for the whole of human history. The speed at which we're unraveling once-unknowable mysteries of the universe is awe-inspiring.

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