Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See by Eric Hedin

Author:Eric Hedin [Hedin, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781637120026
Publisher: Discovery Institute
Published: 2021-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

8. THE CRADLE OF LIFE

WHEN WE TURN OUR GAZE UPON THE MICROSCOPIC DETAILS OF the living cell, it’s almost as if another universe appears before our eyes. The molecular innerworkings of the cell are governed by the same laws of nature that prevail throughout the galaxies, but in the cell, we find complex biochemical mechanisms that far surpass even our most sophisticated technological achievements. One of the questions students often report that they would most like answered is, how did life begin?

Does science have an answer? Before we can unpack this question and explore possible answers, we need a working definition of life. What is life? What defines something as being alive? Is life just chemistry, or is it something more than chemistry? What would you say is the essence of life? Physicist Gerald Schroeder marvels at the “intricacies of life” and states that it involves “the storage, organization, and processing of information.”1 Although computers do these things too, they aren’t alive in the sense we intuitively mean when we describe an organism as alive. Schroeder is describing part of what makes organisms alive, but there’s more to it—much more.

Some other commonly listed characteristics of living things are reproduction, metabolism (intake of food for energy), change with time, responding to the environment, specified complexity, and the ability to die. Computers fail on some of these counts. Rocks obviously fail on several counts.

Interestingly, fire fulfills most of these characteristics. However, it doesn’t possess specified complexity, maintain homeostasis, or respond to environmental changes in quite the way we have in mind when we say living things respond to their environment. A fire may “shrink” from rain or “gobble up” a field of dry grass, but it isn’t responding in the way a flower turns toward the sun, a hand is snatched back from a hot stove, or a bacteria flees from a threat.

Evidence shows that single-celled life existed on Earth almost as soon as Earth’s surface solidified and cooled.2 This relatively short time frame between when conditions for life on Earth first became possible and when life first appeared is a significant finding. The laws of physics and the constraints of information theory pose substantial problems for a naturalistic origin of life within this relatively brief time frame. (More on this in subsequent chapters.) In spite of this, the strait-jacketed mentality of naturalism is forced to conclude from the early arrival of life on Earth that “the step from chemistry to biology is not especially difficult.”3 And yet it is inconceivably difficult. No natural mechanism exists to generate the vast information content of the complex biochemical systems operating within even a single-celled organism.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the overly thick atmosphere of Earth shortly after its formation was mostly removed by the enormous impact which also gave rise to our moon. The remaining, thinner atmosphere allowed light to reach the Earth’s surface. But even this thinner atmosphere was most likely not often clear enough to see the sun and stars, due to the vaporization of crustal material from repeated impacts and heavy volcanic activity.

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