Life: Accident or Act? Teleological and Design Arguments for God’s Existence Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed Thomas Aquinas’ teleological argument and William Paley’s watchmaker analogy as proofs of God’s existence. While both arguments are still used successfully today, more recent arguments have surpassed them in popularity. Among these are probability arguments against the odds of getting life by chance and arguments which assert that complex organisms indicate the existence of intelligent design and, hence, a designer.

First, we should distinguish between creation and design, since these two words are so often associated, we are tempted to use them interchangeably. However, philosopher William Dembski points out:

Creation is always about the source of being of the world. Design is about arrangements of preexisting materials that point to an intelligence. Creation and design are therefore quite different. One can have creation without design and design without creation.

Design arguments can tell us that certain patterns exhibited in nature reliably point us to a designing intelligence, but there’s no inferential chain that leads from such finite design-conducing patterns in nature to the infinite, personal, transcendent Creator God of Christianity. Nevertheless, a design argument can clear away materialistic stumbling blocks to belief in God.[1]

Proponents of intelligent design have used two primary approaches to present their case. One approach is to point out the weaknesses and limitations of the Darwinian evolution model.

In Part 1 of this series, we noted Darwin’s theory of “natural selection” was intended to explain the development of life on earth and its apparent design. According to Darwin, life forms best equipped to survive in harsh or changing environments do survive, passing their abilities on, genetically, to their descendants. Eventually, enough of these abilities (mutations) will produce entirely new creatures, without the need for an intelligent Designer.

However accurate the theory of natural selection might be, it does not explain how life originated from inert matter in the first place. This process, called abiogenesis, assumes that, at some time in earth’s distant past, the molecular building blocks of life came together in nature in just the right conditions to produce organic material.

In the 1920s, working independently, British scientist J. B. S. Haldane and Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin both suggested that organic molecules could have formed during earth’s early history when the atmosphere was low in oxygen but rich in methane and other gases. Oparin believed that under such conditions, if inorganic materials present in the oceans were energized by lightning or ultraviolet radiation, they may have formed complex molecules which, in turn, could have produced “coacervates,” droplets surrounded by a cell-like wall separating its contents from the solution around them. Oparin thought that these coacervates may have been the ancestors of early cells.

Haldane, on the other hand, believed that simple organic molecules formed spontaneously, then became more complex when exposed to ultraviolet light, eventually forming cells. These theories, taken together, were dubbed the primordial soup theory, or more formally, the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis.

In 1952, Harold Urey, a noted Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, theorized that a “large impact” event billions of years ago, where the Earth was struck by a planet-sized object, produced a high temperature, low oxygen atmosphere necessary for the primordial soup to create life. Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the university, got permission from Urey to try an experiment to recreate the conditions of Urey’s theory.

Miller combined methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a sterile glass flask connected to another flask containing 250 milliliters of water. The first flask represented Earth’s “prebiotic” atmosphere (low oxygen, inhibited oxidation). The second flask represented an ocean, which was boiled to mix water vapor with the gases in the first flask. A continuous electrical spark in the first flask simulated lightning.

After a week, a thick red substance collected in a trap on the bottom of the apparatus. In the substance, Miller found several amino acids, building blocks of life. Miller published his results, which were dubbed the “Miller-Urey experiment.” Evolutionists hailed the experiment as proof of abiogenesis. Their claim was that by an accidental, perhaps singular event under just the right conditions, the basic materials of life on earth could have been produced.

However, critics and supporters alike began to take issue both with the experiment and the theory behind it. As other biochemists sought to duplicate the experiment, two results became apparent. First, the simple amino acids which were produced never formed more complex proteins, much less primitive living cells. At best the experiment shows what might have happened under just the right conditions.

Second, when a Teflon-coated apparatus was used to repeat the experiment, it produced different results from the glass apparatus. Evidently, a small amount of the silicate glass apparatus used by Miller eroded into the “soup” produced by the experiment and contributed to the reaction.[2] Of course, neither glass nor Teflon would have been present in any natural primordial ocean, but silicate rocks in the earth’s crust might have been a factor in any primordial chemical reactions.

A third problem for the Miller experiment, and the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis in general, is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states: in any spontaneous chemical or physical process in a closed system, entropy or disorder is always increasing over time. In this case, the assumption by Oparin and the others was that, without external intervention, the first amino acids produced randomly a billion years ago in the assumed prebiotic atmosphere of Earth, through a long spontaneous process of chemical reactions, produced more and more complex molecules, eventually yielding living cells. However, the Second Law indicates that entropy (disorder), not complexity will increase over time.

For these reasons, biochemists, such as A. E. Wilder-Smith, have concluded, “The fact remains, therefore, that the [Oparin-Haldane] theory that life arose by accident falls down on the fact that long time spans do not allow the second law of thermodynamics to be contravened, for long time spans tend to equilibrium and not to the lowering of entropy unless metabolic motors are present.”[3] Translation: over time, any complex molecules produced by chance chemical reactions would more likely break down than increase in complexity, unless some intelligence intervenes to guide them across the threshold from inert matter to living cells.

Just when it seemed the Oparin-Haldane theory was headed for the dustbin of history, in rode biologists Dean Kenyon and Gary Steinman to the rescue. Realizing that the chance combinations of chemicals could not account for abiogenesis, Kenyon and Steinman noted the innate properties of matter, under proper conditions, require certain atoms will naturally bond with others to make chemical compounds. For example, hydrogen and oxygen readily bond to make water.

Thus, they theorized all life consists of matter which is “biochemically predestined” to assemble the elementary chemical building blocks of life.[4] This theory, called chemical affinity, asserts that amino acids have a chemical attraction to each other, resulting in their naturally bonding, like pieces of a puzzle, to form long chains. These chains eventually form proteins, which then self-assemble into living cells.

Wilder-Smith notes the significance of this development:

Kenyon’s theory would lead us to believe, in essence, that life is by no means an accident, but is based on a secret hidden in nonliving matter. Accordingly, life would be expected to arise anywhere and everywhere where conditions are suitable. In fact, life is the very opposite of an accidental occurrence (the Darwinian position), for it is blueprinted in every biomonomer on which it rides.[5]

If biochemical predestination is true, then the materialists have their mechanism for abiogenesis without recourse to God! However, there are good reasons to deny the theory of chemical affinity.

Wilder-Smith notes, “there is little evidence that amino acids and other simple biomonomers possess an inherent order … which would be sufficient to guide them right up to macromolecules, such as hemoglobin, with no exogenous aid.”[6] By “exogenous aid,” he means the presence of enzymes or of an intelligence which would act as a catalyst to guide the chemical reactions necessary to produce and sustain life. In other words, simple, inert compounds do not have the inherent components to produce life.

These components include DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid), molecules which contain the genetic information necessary for biological life, including growth, development, metabolism, and reproduction. Thus, if DNA and RNA are necessary for life, and the products of chemical affinity lacked them, how did these products come alive? And where did DNA and RNA come from?

We should note Dean Kenyon eventually renounced his position in Biochemical Predestination. In 1976, one of Kenyon’s students gave him a copy of Wilder-Smith’s book, The Creation of Life, which we have cited, above. Kenyon could not explain how the first proteins could have been assembled without the aid of DNA instructions. He came to realize that even the simplest life forms are too complex to be produced by unguided chemical processes, and, therefore, life must come from an intelligence able to produce an enormous quantity of complex information.

With the downfall of both the Oparin-Haldane primordial soup theory and the Kenyon-Steinman chemical affinity theory, some evolutionists, such as Richard Dawkins, have suggested a panspermia theory, that life must have begun on another, older planet, such as Mars, and then traveled to earth, perhaps as a microscopic virus aboard a meteorite. Thus, nature would have had an additional 100 million years in the case of Mars, or possibly billions of years for another planet outside our solar system, to produce life.

While panspermia has the advantage of allowing more time for the process of abiogenesis to take place, it still suffers from all the problems faced by the Oparin-Haldane and Kenyon-Steinman theories. At the end of the day, there is no getting around the fact that life, as we know it, only comes from other life.

To be continued