12 June 2020

Life from Life

Since my youth I have always had a great interest in science.  Over the years I took classes of biology, chemistry, physics, and geology.  It is evident through my studies there are certain aspects of science which are "settled," like the law of gravity and biogenesis.  The composition of elements have been established, and mathematic formulas have been discovered to unlock technology and even make space travel possible.  One aspect of science which I have always struggled to process (and my feelings on the subject range from comical to even the ridiculous) is how Darwinian evolution has been crowned by many a "consensus view" and the answer to origin of the universe, our earth, and even life itself.

The other day I was looking up the work Louis Pasteur on biogenesis, the scientist who is credited by many for proving by a simple experiment how living cells can only be reproduced by living cells--a counter position from spontaneous generation.  Pasteur was making no claim to suppose how life began, but he and others through their tests and corresponding evidence confirm life only naturally arises from life.  The Wikipedia page is concise and brief (with only a handful of sources) because biogenesis was effectively proved long ago.  On a whim I decided to look at Wikipedia's offering concerning abiogenesis, and it did not disappoint.  The very lengthy page, sporting hundreds of sources heavy with modern scholarship, begins like this:
"Abiogenesis, or informally the origin of life, is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds.  While the details of this process are still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but an evolutionary process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes.  Although the occurrence of abiogenesis is uncontroversial among scientists, its possible mechanisms are poorly understood."
This is how I would sum up this fancy statement:  "Abiogenesis is a given but no one has any idea how."  And when it comes to origins, science is absolutely in the dark concerning why we exist.  Based on my survey of the article on the subject, abiogenesis is as far from "settled science" as science gets.  It was settled by Pasteur but no one seems to care.  We live in an incredibly complex world full of design, order, microscopic cellular machines, and biological marvels yet Pasteur's study shows me the truth can be simple.  If life only comes from life it follows a living being created our world and all living things in it.  The evidence all around us shows cells, plants, animals, and people reproduce after their own kind.  It is no stretch for me therefore to believe Genesis 1:1 is true:  "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."  Of course this verse does not scientifically prove the existence of God or how the miraculous creation of life on our earth (finely-tuned to support life in countless forms) was made to flourish--but it seems adherents to abiogenesis can do no better.

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