Power question 2: where did life come from

In a recent post, I addressed a video from AIG on "the four power questions to ask an evolutionist". I discussed the first one, "where did the matter of the big bang come from?", in that post. Today I will address the second power question: Where did life come from?

The basic answer I gave to the previous question applies here as well. I think the best answer is: we are not sure. I have seen some people object to this because it implies a greater level of ignorance than we have. It is true, we know a lot more about the origin of life now than 50 years ago. Maybe some people would think I am saying we don't have any idea. But it is also true that there is no consensus theory for the origin of life.

I like to imagine a student coming up, all ready to be combative and asking "where did the matter for the big bang come from?", the professor says "we aren't sure", and the student realizes that his question doesn't matter. The advantage of saying we don't know the answer to questions like this is that it makes clear that the student is making an argument from ignorance, and it also makes clear that they are simply replacing the phrase "we don't know" with God. It is important that people realize science doesn't explain everything. There are things we don't know. A theory isn't rejected because it can't explain every last point. Evolution explain what happened to life once it formed, not how it formed. Even if we were 100% ignorant of the origin of life (which we aren't), that is not an argument against the stuff we do know. Even if we don't know where the matter came from, it doesn't mean the big bang didn't happen. It is a thought that probably hasn't occured to many creationists.

Even though that is the easiest answer, I will discuss other points brought up in the video. Several times the speaker (Mike Riddle) makes the inevitable confusion about chance. He says that the scientific theory for the origin of life is: time + chance = life, which is of course completely absurd. He brings out the usual calculations of the chances of getting a protein by chance and shows it is impossible and includes a quote mine from a scientist saying "the simplest cell couldn't have arisen by chance". The fact that we don't think it happened by chance, and that is the scientists point, is ignored. After he says that time + chance = life, he asks sarcastically "doesn't that make you feel good? Doesn't it make you feel special?" He is using how special a theory makes you feel as a criterion to evaluate it.

Riddle makes a basic mistake in chemistry. He says that matter is made up of atoms, atoms combine to make molecules, molecules combine to make amino acids, and amino acids combine to make proteins. Funny, I thought an amino acid is a molecule. What molecules combine to make an amino acid?

He then discusses the Urey-Miller experiment, as creationists always do, with the usual problems. First, he suggests that Miller left oxygen out of his mixture because he knew oxygen harms life. Miller left oxygen out because the best evidence at the time suggested it wasn't present, not to get a predetermined result. Riddle points out that there is now evidence there might have been more oxygen, and says that the evidence is ignored by scientists. Anyone who would make that claim simply doesn't know how science or scientists works. Riddle acts as if Miller's was the only experiment or only atmosphere that was tried, when in fact many other atmospheres have been shown to work.

There is no indication that there are other possible ways for the building blocks to arise, including in space. There is no indication that even if the atmosphere was oxidizing, there could be microenvironments that were reducing, such as deep sea vents. In the video, Riddle is trying to argue that there is no possible natural explanation for the origin of life. Even if he completely disproved everything about the Miller experiment, he would not have shown that all explanations fail.

He then lies. That's the only way to describe this misrepresentation. He says that oxygen is harmful for the origin of life. But oxygen is needed to make ozone, and without ozone we would be "fried", so not having oxygen is bad for life too. Since both having and not having oxygen is bad for life, it must have been created. I wonder if he has any idea what the real effect of not having ozone is. Life wouldnt' be "fried". Rather, we would have more UV radiation and more mutations for organisms exposed to the UV. What he seems to fail to understand is that water also filters out UV radiation. Ozone protects organisms on land from UV light. For organisms in the ocean, it is irrelevant.

Finally he points out that all life has left handed amino acids, but the Miller experiment produces a mixture of right and left handed amino acids. He considers this an insurmountable problem. It's simple. Living things used one kind of amino acid from the primordial soup but not the other (we don't know why). The right handed amino acids formed, but just weren't used by the first cells. Is it necessary that every organic molecule in the primitive ocean be utilized by life? Cyanide was made in the Miller experiment, but it isn't used by living things. Does that disprove the validity of the experiment.

The strangest part of this discussion was when Riddle pointed out that when we die, our amino acids revert to a mixture of right handed and left handed amino acids. He seemed to find this very significant, but I am not sure why. To me, what that means is that even now we are surrounded by right and left handed amino acids in the environment, just as the first cells were. If we can have right handed amino acids in our environment now but maintain all left handed in cells, why couldn't they? I got the impression that he thinks it requires an act of God or miracle to maintain living amino acids in the left handed form even today, not just at some creation point in the past. In other words, he is invoking God not just for creation, but for the every day miracle of having left handed amino acids. Maybe he had another point to make, but I cannot see it.

The first two power questions are simply arguments from ignorance. The boil down to: evolution, or the big bang, can't explain absolutely everything, therefore it's wrong. If we don't know, then God must have done it. Since God started those things, he did everything else too.

When we argue with creationists, we should agree beforehand to just discuss the evolution of vertebrates, or some other narrow, well documented topic. In the end, that's all they care about. In fact, we could just look at human evolution. If I were to say the universe was created by God, life was created by God, God did the Cambrian explosion, but evolution produced humans, they would object. So why are we arguing over these other things? I suggested this to Pastor Eckstein. We will restrict our discussion to the evolution of vertebrates. If one of us can convince the other about that topic, then we can worry about the Cambrian explosion or the origin of life. This prevents the constant moving of the goalposts and arguments from ignorance that creationists love.