Overview

How did the first lifeform on Earth arise?

The most popular hypothesis among scientists is that life arose from nonliving matter somehow, which is called chemical evolution or abiogenesis. This is typically taught as fact in highschools and universities, as though any alternative would be ridiculous. However, as any honest scientist will admit that there is no particular mechanism which has been thoroughly proven, so why assume that abiogenesis is true? The answer is that a scientist who believes there is no God must of course assume that there is no God behind any past events, leaving the only options for the origin of life to be spontaneous. It is not that science has proven God has not done it; it is that many scientists do not believe in God and thus promote other theories.

If there was a murder trial in which your brother was the prime suspect, but you said that under no circumstances would you believe that your brother did it, would strong evidence that everyone else who could have been involved did not do it make you reconsider your brother's innocence? I ask because many people, especially the intelligentsia, will rule out God's existence before considering the facts, yet as I demonstrate very briefly here, there is nothing unreasonable about the existence of God. Indeed, that we are conscious (and self-aware), have free will, and understand good and evil, among other things, makes a very convincing case for God (read Proofs of God's Existence). Therefore, let us put God back on the table of possibilities as we consider our options.

Now the easiest way to think through this issue is to make comparisons: Take an average car. Would you believe me if I said mine randomly assembled itself in a tornado at the rubbish dump? How about during a major earthquake at a car manufacturing plant? What if I said it came from space, and that given the billions of years this universe has been around for, a car was bound to assemble itself, and by chance, it got here. Obviously, all these scenarios are ridiculous. Even a sandwich does not assemble itself, let alone something as complicated as a car, but consider that even a simple cell is far more complicated than a car, and many of its parts hardly or never exist apart from living things in nature. Should you believe that a cell once assembled itself?

Those who do not believe in intelligent design sometimes attempt to get around the point just made by trying to imagine that life began in more primitive versions than what we can see now, but all these ideas fall short. Even the most essential attributes—information storage and replication of that information—require astoundingly complex machinery and very specific properties. Therefore, for life to appear at random, we would need a series of sophisticated, self-replicating machines to appear, and all within a tiny area that can dynamically control pH and more. Pretty absurd, isn't it? I will only briefly cover some of the details below, though you will find many helpful resources for further investigation along the way.

The Obstacles to Creating Life from Non-Life

Complexity

The complexity of living things fills volumes of books, and it is still being unravelled. We will take the example of proteins, which are each built of smaller units. The average protein contains hundreds of amino acids in a specific order, and there are 20 main amino acids in most forms of life (with notable exceptions), so you can imagine how many different combinations there could be for a 200 amino-acid protein (think of picking a number from 1 to 20, 200 times, and then lining those numbers up), yet the combination must be quite consistent to accomplish the right task in a cell. Now consider that there are many different proteins in every cell, and you will begin to understand the scale of the problem of all the right proteins simply coming about due to the laws of chemistry and chance for the first form of life.

Even leaving aside how each complex part of the cell is formed, we can see that some of these parts are likely too complex to be created without a blueprint in the first place, and atheist scientists would have to insist that there was no blueprint. The main method for countering this problem of complexity on a small scale is to point to laboratory experiments in extreme conditions whose authors misrepresented their results, or popular articles about those experiments which make outrageous claims. Since the claims these people make are meant to convince average people to disbelieve in God, why are the articles which the actual evidence so inaccessible? I think suspicion of all the academic pretension is warranted.

Integration

The systems living beings use are highly dependent on one another. This applies to even a single cell (humans are estimated to have 30 trillion, besides many other components), which requires information storage (DNA), machinery to copy the information (such as DNA polymerases—a marvel in themselves), machinery for translating that information into useful products (ribosomes, tRNA, mRNA, etc.), means of keeping the information from damage and repairing it (endonucleases, DNA ligase, etc.), a container (membrane), a system of energy production to sustain these processes, etc. In other words, the cell is highly integrated, and it must run continuously. This makes a gradual "evolution" of a cell from inorganic material highly implausible, as many components in perfect working order would need to appear together, or the whole system would collapse and be useless (the concept is irreducible complexity).

This concept of irreducible complexity does not mean there cannot be simple and complex versions of biological systems (for example, more and less complex versions of "eyes"), but it does mean that they must arise essentially all at once, and that modifying one part of such a system would normally require modifications to many other parts as well. This makes a strong case against the spontaneous appearance of life, as it points out that living things are extremely intricate and functional, like machines that are far beyond the design capabilities of our best engineers, and therefore, they could not appear without a designer far smarter than us.

For examples of complexity of the systems involved in cells, read this explanation of translation, or you could watch a secular video on DNA damage and repair.

Instability

Without careful maintenance and protection from the environment, RNA, DNA, and proteins (among others) do not normally last long. While scientists such as H. S. Bernhardt suggest an acidic environment supported the development of RNA with various roles (leading eventually to a state that can be called living), others have shown that RNA simply does not last long, regardless of pH (a few days, at best). Likewise, proteins are easily rendered useless by an uncontrolled or unfavourable environment. The instability of the components of life in non-biological settings further reduces the probability of their randomly coming together in the right way, since if they appear, they fall apart again quickly.

Information

A DNA sequence carries real information—a random sequence will not do. These sequences are very long in even the smallest cells (159,622 base pairs). Therefore, it is not just unreasonable but silly to suggest that a meaningful DNA sequence could arise by chance. To do so would be to suggest that a dense book of chemical manufacturing instructions was created by typing random letters on a keyboard for long enough. Also, remember that this rare information-carrying DNA sequence would presumably have had to appear at the same time as working proteins, a membrane with its membrane proteins, etc., for the creation of the first life. For a further explanation, read The Origins of Complex Specified Information.

The Concentration Problem

The concentration problem is that even if a pond, or the ocean itself, were to by lightening or other conditions acquire organic molecules, then they would surely disperse far too quickly to ever result in the development of a self-replicating, coordinated conglomerate of molecules. In other words, the problem is the lack of a cell membrane, which besides forming a barrier to keep cellular contents in and other chemicals out, anchors signalling machines, pumps out waste products, pumps in necessary chemicals, etc. Far from being a simple drop of oil, every cell membrane consists of amphipathic phospholipids (which alone are difficult to assemble) and a variety of pumps, each of which is normally a complex protein.

The solutions to this problem consist of attempts to do without or replace the complex system of a cell membrane, but of course, what is being hoped for is highly implausible: for an inorganic system to spontaneously arise and be sustained which mimics a carefully integrated, dynamic organic system. Indeed, small spheres exist in nature that could house some of the chemicals needed for life, but more is needed than just a closed area, since as a lightbulb needs continuous electricity to run, cellular reactions constantly require more reactants (think of fuel), and they generate waste products that need to be gotten rid of. Therefore, control over inward and outward flow is needed, so simple pores will not do. As you can see, this is a significant obstacle, as we are asking for multiple kinds of chemical pumps for even the simplest reactions to go on continuously.

Intelligent Design

There is nothing irrational about the existence of a conscious creator, which is what intelligent design proposes is the most reasonable explanation of the evidence. Indeed, just as we know houses must be built by people, many people understand that life must have been created by God. However, if this makes you severely uncomfortable, I suggest you do something: see if you can write down why you think God cannot exist, and then see if there are good answers to your objections. Otherwise, you must admit that you are simply prejudiced.

It is not scientific to believe that "perhaps a theory which substantiates our point of view will arise one day." It is wishful thinking. However, this is the view of most scientists, since they do not have any certainty about how life really arose, but they will not admit the possibility of God, since they consider it primitive or embarrassing, or scary. Yet it would be just as rational for me to believe that perhaps a cat or a dog accidentally built the three-bedroom house down the street through the convenient placement of the right tools and materials, but certainly, it was not a builder. In other words, not only is chemical evolution improbable, it is foolish.

If you are still not convinced, I recommend the work of Stephen C. Meyer, Long Story Short videos, and Creation.com. There are many books, articles, and videos on the subject for various levels of understanding, but there is all sorts of propaganda out there, and this is a topic with enormous amounts of research and literature, so I suggest you use wisdom and don't get too lost in the weeds before you reach your conclusion.

Resources

🎙️ Podcasts and Videos

• The Impossible Problem of the Origin of Life—Creation Talk Podcast.
• Long Story Short—a YouTube thoroughly explaining why the evolutionary view just doesn't work in lots of videos.

📚 Books

• Signature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer.

📇 Websites and Articles

• Origin of life—An explanation of what is needed for abiogenesis (or biopoiesis) by Don Batten.
• Can Natural Processes Explain the Origin of Life?—Answers in Genesis.

Appendix: Popular Theories

Panspermia

Panspermia is the idea that aliens started life here. Though popular, even Wikipedia dismantles this theory. It simply refuses to answer the question it claims to answer, saying that life came from other plants. How did life start on them? This is not addressed.

RNA World

The RNA World hypothesis proposes that RNA, since it both catalyse some reactions and store information, may have been the key to early life. It is unrealistic for the same reasons mentioned in the article: (i) useful RNAs are too complex to arise by chance, especially groups of them that could somehow evolve; (ii) RNA is unstable (environmental RNA could not last more than 57 hours in one experiment I found); (iii) very complex and specific information cannot arise by chance, because there is never enough time for some unlikely events to occur; (iv) RNA requires other chemicals to be sustained and fulfil its roles, so it is usually or always part of an integrated system.

In addition, RNA's catalytic capabilities are limited. Nevertheless, some say it can even self-replicate, but this "self-replication" has only been accomplished with a very complex mixture of essential components the researchers added to the mix. This mixture could never have existed in nature.

Primordial Soup

It is thought by many that perhaps the conditions of Earth were once such that the molecules essential for life were abundant enough for the creation of life. The Miller–Urey experiment attempted to demonstrate this. Of course, the theory fails to acknowledge the seriousness of the challenges of creating life through chemical evolution, e.g., the concentration problem; the very unstable nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins; the rarity of functional proteins among possible sequences of amino acids (sequence space); and the need for information replication machinery from the beginning, which is very complex. However, it also faces the problem of not being in line with the modern understanding of what Earth's atmosphere was really like in the past.

The Iron Monosulphide Compartment Hypothesis

This solution to the concentration problem is that iron monosulphide compartments may have formed around alkaline vents in the acidic Hadean Ocean, and have been able to contain a concentrated organic solution. That, they propose, would allow some cellular metabolism to develop before the pre-cells gained membranes, and were able to become free-living. The metabolic development section of their hypothesis relies on the idea that a pH difference between the membrane's compartment and the external environment could be used to transfer energy into the compartment in a useful way.

I will point out two catastrophic errors:

1. There is in fact no charge difference between the alkaline emissions of such vents and the theoretically acidic Hadean Ocean—merely a pH difference. This is a fundamental error no honest biochemist would have made.
2. The compartments are not, in fact, entirely segregated from one another, and the pores between them appear to be easily 1–2 μM wide. Such a pore in a membrane would be extremely compromising to a cellular-like compartment's ability to maintain a disparity in concentration between itself and an exogenous environment of any internal molecules. To illustrate the importance of near-total impermeability to certain molecules, an immunological mode of defence against pathogenic cells relies on forming a pore in the membrane: the compliment system's membrane attack complex (MAC). Add to this the fact that even minor unresolvable changes in ion concentration can have dire consequences for cells.