Nobody Knows How Life Started

Here is a question that sounds simple but has confounded the brightest minds on the planet for over 70 years: how did life start?

Not how did life evolve — that is a different question. How did the very first living cell arise from non-living chemistry? How did inert molecules become alive?

Nobody knows.

In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey ran a famous experiment. They simulated what they believed was Earth's early atmosphere, applied electrical discharge, and produced some amino acids — the building blocks of proteins.

Headlines declared victory. "Life created in a lab!" Textbooks still feature this experiment.

But here is what is often left out:

• They produced amino acids, not life. That is like claiming you built a house because you found some bricks in a field.
• The atmospheric composition they used was almost certainly wrong — the early Earth likely had a different gas mixture that does not produce amino acids as readily.
• Even the amino acids they obtained were a mix of types that life does not use (life exclusively uses left-handed amino acids; Miller produced both).

More than 70 years later, nobody has come remotely close to creating a living cell from scratch.

The simplest living cell is incomprehensibly complex. Even the most basic bacteria require:

• DNA or RNA to store genetic information
• Proteins to read and execute that information
• A membrane to contain everything
• An energy system to power the entire operation
• A replication system to reproduce

And here is the central difficulty — these systems are interdependent:

• You need DNA to make proteins
• You need proteins to copy DNA
• You need a membrane to hold it all together
• You need proteins to build the membrane
• You need DNA to code for those proteins

It is a chicken-and-egg problem of extraordinary scale. Every component requires the others to already exist. There is no obvious way to build this system one piece at a time.

The most popular current theory is the "RNA World" — the idea that RNA came first because it can both store information and act as a catalyst (like a protein).

Problems:

• RNA is extremely fragile and breaks down quickly
• Nobody has demonstrated how RNA could form spontaneously in nature
• Even simple self-replicating RNA molecules have not been produced without significant intervention from researchers (which undermines the "it happened without direction" argument)
• The gap between self-replicating RNA and an actual cell remains enormous

Biochemist Robert Shapiro called the RNA World hypothesis "a premature choice" and noted that "the spontaneous formation of RNA under prebiotic conditions is extremely difficult."

Mathematician and astronomer Fred Hoyle calculated the probability of a single functional protein forming by chance. His conclusion: 1 in 10^40,000. For context, there are only about 10^80 atoms in the observable universe.

Hoyle (himself an atheist) said this is comparable to "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747."

Even with generous assumptions, the probability of a self-replicating system with DNA, RNA, proteins, and a membrane arising through random chemistry is vanishingly small.

Scientists working on this problem are remarkably candid about how little progress has been made:

• Eugene Koonin (evolutionary biologist): "The origin of life is the hardest problem in all of science."
• Steve Benner (origin-of-life chemist): "We have failed in our attempt to explain the origin of life."
• James Tour (synthetic chemist, Rice University): "Nobody has a clue how life got started. If they tell you they do, they don't know what they're talking about."

This is not about "gaps" that science will eventually fill. The more we learn about cellular complexity, the more difficult the problem becomes, not easier. Every new discovery reveals another layer of interdependent systems that all need to be present simultaneously.

The Bible says God created life — that he spoke it into existence, that he breathed life into dust. That is a claim about an intelligent agent producing information-rich, functionally complex systems.

Every day in laboratories around the world, brilliant scientists use their intelligence, planning, and resources to try to create life from scratch. They have not succeeded. Yet we are asked to believe that no intelligence was required when it happened the first time.

Consider that for a moment.