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.

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

Most of us are missing so much because we can't see the bigger picture...

That the RNA is the catalytic part of the ribosome is well known. It’s basic.

My comment was simply to point it out, not to judge if someone should know or not.

Re: That the RNA is the catalytic part of the ribosome is well known. It’s basic.

Right back where we started.

Just like the author, I am saying that the ribosome organelle is constructed out of proteins.

You said that when all the proteins are removed from the ribosome structure, it still functions normally.

That sounded pretty weird - like, you can take all the support columns out of a building, but it won't fall down.

However, since I am not a biologist, I agreed to take your word for it.

A claim like that might pass for “common knowledge” in your universe, but not in mine.

Semiotics is simply the symbolic representation of meaning.

DNA = digital code = semiotics.

Semiotics requires mind.

In crude deductive form:

1. The origin of digital code requires a mind.

2. DNA is a digital code.

3. Therefore, the origin of DNA requires a mind.

You’re not writing articles about biology. Which makes sense.

It’s not arcane or esoteric anymore than knowing DNA is the genetic material or ATP is produced in the mitochondria.

Re: It’s not arcane or esoteric anymore than knowing DNA is the genetic material or ATP is produced in the mitochondria.

I know exactly what DNA, ATP, and mitochondria are.

What I don’t know is how you selectively remove the protein structure of an organelle without destroying it.

I am looking forward to your helpful instruction.

RNA will form it’s own structure. Proteins are often associated.

RNA, unlike DNA, is very flexible.

In this case the proteins were removed with protease and SDS, a detergent. Neither affect RNA.

Unusual Resistance of Peptidyl Transferase to Protein Extraction Procedures

Harry F. Noller, Vernita Hoffarth and Ludwika Zimniak
Science
New Series, Vol. 256, No. 5062 (Jun. 5, 1992), pp. 1416-1419

Interesting.

And, where are the ribosome structural proteins manufactured?

Just to be clear, I am not a religious person, and I find the Theory of Evolution to be very persuasive and very helpful.

However, the “chicken or egg” mystery of structural proteins in ribosomes has not been easily or compellingly explained.

So, the ribosome is producing it's own structural proteins?

What adaptive function did that serve since free floating cellular RNA apparently worked just fine before the structural proteins showed up?

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