February 24
One of the great challenges for evolutionary thinkers has always been the scientific fact that you cannot get living things from non-living things. It is the great chasm that must be hurdled to support an evolutionary view that all living things came from non-living matter.
In the 1950’s, that chasm was claimed to be crossed. The impassable chasm was crossed. Life was brought from non-living material.
The experiment conducted by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, gave the world convincing proof that living things could come from non-living matter. This discovery swept the headlines and made it into all the science books as proof that, given the right circumstances, all life could have come from non-life. Proof positive. Evolution is true. It’s a fact!
Except it wasn’t.
The Miller-Urey experiment was fraught with problems (from the use of the wrong type of atmosphere… to the fact that it was impossible for the amino acids they produced to become living cells – not to mention the fact that intelligent minds were at work creating the “random” events) – and was simply downplayed or discarded by most scientists from the 60’s on. Yet, the Miller-Urey experiment is still displayed in most of our science textbooks today. It is still being taught as scientific proof that everything evolved through random processes. Even though science has proven that Miller’s experiment is now irrelevant, and proves nothing.
Even Science magazine said (in 1995) that experts now dismiss the Miller-Urey experiment because “the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation.”
The fact is… Science still says: life cannot come from non-life – and no one, to this day, has been able to prove otherwise.
This fact has made an impact on many scientists. While still searching for proof that living things can come from non-living things, many are forced to recognize what most scientists are reluctant to say: Life seems to be… a miracle.
Science Journalist, John Horgan, has said: “Science… has discovered that our existence is infinitely improbable, and hence a miracle.” And biochemist and Nobel prize winner, Francis Crick, has stated: “The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
What science is telling us is that creating life is no minor thing. You can’t just put some atmosphere in a chamber and hit it with electricity and life emerges (basically the Miller-Urey experiment). There are several complex procedures that must happen with the right things in just the right order at just the right time to produce a living cell (the amazing building blocks of all living things).
Cell Biologist, Jonathan Wells explains the difficulty in making a cell: “To produce a living cell you would have to get the right number of the right kinds of amino acids to link up to create a protein molecule. Then you would need dozens of protein molecules, again in the right sequence. The odds against this are astonishing.”
So astonishing, in fact, that no scientist has ever been able to do it (certainly including Miller and Urey). In fact, it seems to be quite beyond any human ability.
Surely this tells us something important.
If there is something that is “beyond us…” then maybe there is Someone of unlimited ability also beyond us. Someone of infinite intelligence Who is capable of producing life from non-life – something that even scientists use the term “miracle” to describe.
And it just so happens that there is One Who has been known to do miracles.
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