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by Thomas F. Heinze, revised July 2004
Spontaneous Generation?
“The scientific principle that life only comes from life is called Biogenesis.” {Essenfeld, Gontang, Moore, Addison-Wesley Biology, 1996, p. 223} It states that spontaneous generation does not happen, instead, every living thing has come from some other living thing. It is one of the best proved scientific principles, sometimes called the Law of Biogenesis. Even the most atheistic schoolbook authors admit that all the scientific evidence, both observational and experimental, upholds this basic scientific principle. More and more school books, however, are now claiming that there once was an exception to this basic principle of science; that a first living cell came about as very complex chemicals evolved and formed life without the help of a Creator. Since this is spontaneous generation, and almost everyone now knows that spontaneous generation is anti scientific, the name has been changed to “abiogenesis” which comes from roots which mean: “not biogenesis”. You may be thinking,“So there are two views on where life came from, so what?”
If the Biology textbooks are right, there is no God who created living things, and it follows that there is no heaven or hell! What should we live for, and what should be our moral standards? Here is a typical atheistic response: “It is very hard to admit that there is only one single reason for each of us to come into this world: to transmit our DNA to the next generation. There is absolutely no other purpose for us to be born.” {Maxim D. Frank-Kamenetskii, Unraveling DNA, 1997, p. 130.}
If this is right, any moral rules that limit our sexual activity hinder us in accomplishing the “one single reason for each of us to come into this world”. Hollywood is a leader in exporting the new moral standards throughout the world. Some Middle Eastern Muslims go to the movies and think they have understood American culture. They call America “the great Satan,” and are willing to strap on bombs and give their lives to strike back at us. Why not? They believe that in death they will be rewarded with 72 virgins. Some western men, thankful that Hollywood and the schools are desensitizing girls to sin, are going after their 72 virgins in the here and now.
I started studying the origin of life to compare the scientific evidence that favors an intelligent Creator with that which favors abiogenesis. I had read about the subject a good deal, so I went into the study believing that I would find more scientific evidence favoring an intelligent living Creator who designed and made life, than that which supports abiogenesis. I was also influenced by the fact that I read the Bible every day. It explains that God created certain categories of living things. In addition, years ago at Oregon State College, I accepted God’s offer of salvation based on the fact that Christ paid for my sins, and since then have seen Him doing all kinds of things in my own life and the lives of other Christians. Knowing God and having found Him trustworthy increased my expectation that I would find more evidence that life was created by an intelligent and capable designer than I would find supporting abiogenesis.
In spite of all this, I was not prepared for what I found! After reading book after book promoting abiogenesis, some written by expert origin of life researchers, it began to dawn on me that I had not found a single book that gave even one shred of scientific evidence that life had begun by abiogenesis. I have a request out on this website for anyone who knows of any to let me know, and no one has. Compelled by their faith in the atheistic idea that God did not create life, the authors of books promoting abiogenesis support their thesis with speculation, made up fables, and scenarios instead of evidence.
As I searched, I was able to find a great deal of scientific evidence, but it was against abiogenesis, and for an intelligent Creator. As you read ahead, watch as I pile the evidence before you; first evidence against abiogenesis, and then evidence for an intelligent planner and Creator.
There is a great deal of solid evidence, but I have had to look beyond the textbooks to find it. First life researchers, for example, who have tried for years without success to make a cell, or even just one of its components in their laboratories face a problem. They may be atheists and want abiogenesis to have happened, but if they repeat the made up stories textbooks use to convince students that life, or some step toward life happens easily, why can’t they make it happen in their labs? Are they incompetent? If they give that impression, financing for their research will dry up. With motivation like that, researchers sometimes present real scientific evidence instead of making abiogenesis sound easy.
The same is true when a scientist holds a new or minority position on some point because the majority position really won’t work. If he doesn’t point out the holes in the dominant theory, why should anyone accept his replacement for it? When we look for it, the truth shows up.
Were the materials cells are made of available?
Cells are known for their very large molecules such as proteins, DNA, and RNA. For a cell to form without a Creator, these things, or at least their components would have to have been available. Reasonable atheists admit this: “If life indeed started without the help of miracles, the first organisms must have been made of materials that were easily available.” {Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth, 2000, p. 127.} This obvious fact puts textbook authors who oppose the Creator in a terrible bind because, as we will see, the very large molecules cells are made of never form in nature, except in already living cells. DNA and RNA can’t even be made in the lab!
Since they can’t support their position with evidence, many textbook authors who don’t believe that God created living things, back up their statements about how life might have happened with made up stories. Let’s examine a few of the most popular stories of how life began by abiogenesis in the order in which they became popular. Notice that each of these stories claims that life started with different chemical. Not one of these chemicals will form in nature except in already living cells:
The myth that Lipids formed in nature and produced the first life
If you pour a little oil in water and shake it up, the oil separates into little round balls called coacervates. Chemists call oils and fats “lipids.” In the days when microscopes were still too crude to give much idea of the complexity of cells, some people thought that these tiny bubbles of fat must have evolved into cells. Here is an example:
“When mixed with water, certain lipids will form a bubble that is called a coacervate (koh AS uhr vayt) which has a double-layered membrane much like the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane.… The early oceans probably contained numerous small lipid coacervates, each one forming and then dispersing. Over millions of years, coacervates that could survive longer by taking in molecules and energy from their surroundings would have become more common than the here-today-gone-tomorrow kind. When a means arose to transfer this ability to “offspring” coacervates, probably through self-replicating RNA, life had begun.” {Holt, Annotated Teacher’s Edition, Biology, Visualizing Life, 1998, p. 194} This simplistic little made up story is contrary to the evidence!
Both lipids and RNA are too complex to form in nature, so the statement that both formed at the same time, and in the same place with the RNA inside a lipid membrane is also false. Here is a quote by Cairns-Smith, one of the most prominent first life researchers which explains that lipids, and the nucleotides which make up RNA are only formed in the miniature factories of already living cells:
"Though a few organic substances - for instance certain simple amino acids - can form fairly easily under prebiotic conditions, other biochemical building blocks such as nucleotides and lipids, require for their synthesis a ‘real factory.’ … The synthesis of these substances involves a series of reactions, each reaction following the previous one in utmost accuracy." {Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth, 2000, p. 126, 176-177; Quoting Cairns-Smith, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, 1985, p. 126.}
Notice that lipids are not produced in nature except by already living cells. Therefore, the story that lipid coacervates produced or helped produce the first cell is simply not true. Since this also applies to nucleotides, the building blocks of RNA, the story in Biology, Visualizing Life is false in this point also. But millions read textbooks, and who reads an origin of life researcher like Cairns-Smith? Few if any of the kids and teachers that you know will ever discover the truth unless you give them copies of this booklet.
There was another false statement in the schoolbook quote. Did you catch it?
“Over millions of years, coacervates that could survive longer by taking in molecules and energy from their surroundings would have become more common than the here-today-gone-tomorrow kind.”
Is this true? Does natural selection work on chemicals like lipids? No, it works on living things that can keep track of information, reproduce, and pass the information on to their offspring. { James P. Ferris, “From Building Blocks to the Polymers of Life,” in Life’s Origin, Editor: JW Schopf, 2002, p.136} While lipid coacervates did not exist till living things made them, they have been around for a considerable period of time, and have not evolved as claimed.
Though there was no source of lipids before real cells were present to make them, lipids would still have been vital to a first cell because cell membranes are made of lipids. Whatever cell part an atheist wants to believe came first, if it did not have a functioning membrane surrounding it, the other parts would just have just been so much loose goo dissolving into the ocean. The proposed membrane, however, must do much more than keep the cell’s parts together. If a cell is to live, its membrane must also let in nourishment while keeping out unwanted materials and expelling wastes. Lipids can’t do all this alone, so real cell membranes also contain pumps and channels which are made of proteins. {Bruce Alberts, etc. Essential Cell Biology, An Introduction to the Molecular Biology of the Cell, 1998, p. 347.}
The myth that proteins formed in nature, and produced life
Stanley Miller showed in his famous experiment in 1953 that amino acids could be formed under conditions that might have occurred in nature. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins which are the main ingredients of living things, so After Miller’s experiment, false but convincing stories were made up about amino acids produced in nature linking to form proteins and combining with DNA to form living things. In nature, proteins are only produced by already living cells, never by amino acids spontaneously linking together. Tied to this story about proteins, Miller’s experiment became the most widely publicized origin of life experiment of all time, even though in nature, proteins are only made by already living cells.
Before Miller, Oparin had worked with “proteinoids,” which also received a lot of hype, but the amino acids in proteins are hooked together one behind the next, like cars in a train, or pearls on a string, while Oparin’s proteinoids were small spheres which will not work in living things
Leslie Orgel is one of the foremost origin of life scientists today. He contributed a chapter, “The Origin of Biological Information” to the book, Life’s Origin. His chapter explains nothing about what one would expect after reading the title, but what he says about the materials needed to produce cells is very revealing. Orgel says organic chemists should have invented the computer scientist’s motto, “Garbage in, garbage out,” because if they have garbage rather than a pure compound going into an experiment, garbage is what will come out. While school text books used Miller’s famous experiment to convince students that chemicals built up and became life, Orgel uses the same experiment to show that what Miller got was garbage: “For example, Miller’s classic experiment (discussed in chapter 3) produces tar along with a percent or two of a complex mixture of racemic amino acids … .” {Leslie E. Orgel, “The Origin of Biological Information,” from the bookLife’s Origin, edited by J. William Shopf, 2002, p. 140.}
In this short explanation, Orgel says three things:
• Miller’s experiment, the most famous of all origin of life experiments, produced all garbage except for a percent or two of the desired amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins, the main ingredients of cells.
• The amino acids that made up that percent or two were “Racemic,” which means mixed right and left handed. Proteins will not work in cells unless all their amino acids are left handed, but amino acids made in nature or in experiments that simulate nature are half left, and half right-handed, and will not work in proteins. Even if there had been a way to produce all left-handed amino acids, they gradually break down to half and half. {See my book How Life Began, p. 15-16 for explanation and documentation.} Half and half won’t work, but neither will 90% left handed amino acids, or 99%. Since only pure left-handed amino acids will work in living things, {Life’s Origin, p. 73, 151} the percent or two of amino acids that were also produced were nicer garbage, but still garbage that would not work in living cells.
Orgel points these things out to help us understand that unless there is a way that nature can produce a pure enough form of the building blocks of protein to be useful, it is hard to see how any proteins produced could be used in a cell. He illustrates with amino acids to spotlight the problem of producing functional RNA which is almost infinitely more difficult. He asks: “How could chemistry on the primitive Earth proceed in such a messy way, producing information rich living cells, those exquisitely designed chemical factories, from such unpromising starting materials? This is the central and as yet largely unanswered question facing investigators on the origin of life.” {Editor: JW Schopf, Life’s Origin, Leslie E. Orgel, 2002, p. 140.} Orgel goes on to look at attempts that have been made to solve the problem of getting anything that could possibly serve to form cells, but concludes the chapter lamenting the very large gap that separates the huge molecules of RNA from the small molecules of non living things.{Life’s Origin, Leslie E. Orgel, “The Origin of Biological Information” 2002,p. 154.}
Another problem is that without the little factory of the living cell, amino acids will not link together one after another to form proteins. Even when scientists buy all left-handed amino acids at a chemical supply house and make a perfect organic broth, no proteins are produced. Even some school books now admit:
"Scientists have not been able to cause amino acids dissolved in water to join together to form proteins. The energy-requiring chemical reactions that join amino acids are reversible and do not occur spontaneously in water. However, most scientists no longer argue that the first proteins assembled spontaneously. Instead, they now tell us that the initial macromolecules were composed of RNA, and that RNA later catalyzed the formation of proteins."{George B. Johnson, Peter H. Raven, Biology, Principles & Explorations, Holt, Rinhehart and Winston, 1996 p. 235}
Most of those who rejected their Creator to trust the made up stories that proteins or lipids formed the first life have since abandoned these stories to trust in:
The myth that the first living cell was started by RNA.
Andrew Knoll, a professor at Harvard explains an obstacle to the claim that RNA was the material from which life was formed: No RNA or its building blocks were available:
“Worst of all, even if we could produce the right components, combining them to form nucleotides, the building blocks of nucleic acids, is daunting. To date, no one has figured out how to do it.”
Knoll is admitting here that no one can yet make the nucleotides which are the building blocks of RNA and DNA. Even if a scientist had all the right parts to start out with he could not put them together to make even the nucleotide building blocks of RNA, let alone RNA itself.
Knoll’s quote continues: “There is still another difficulty. Nucleotides are chiral molecules, which is to say that they come in two forms which are mirror images of each other—like your hands. RNA can be built from right-handed or left-handed molecules, but mixed chains won’t grow. How then could RNA—which in cells consists exclusively of right handed nucleotides—have emerged from a fifty-fifty mixture of left- and right-handed building blocks? Again, no one knows.
The problems are so difficult that many researchers have given up on the idea that RNA was the primordial molecule of life.” {Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Earth, 2003, p. 79.}
Others, instead of joining those who have given up on RNA, and searching for a simpler molecule on which life might have been built, claim that RNA may have formed on some clay which served as a template on which RNA was built. They cite experiments which have shown that when fresh building blocks of RNA (nucleotides) are placed on clay daily, some will connect together to form short strings. {Editor: JW Schopf, Life’s Origin,James P. Ferris, “From Building Blocks to the Polymers of Life,” 2002, p. 123.} Finding a scientist who would have been able to place fresh nucleotides on the clay daily before there were any living cells to produce the nucleotides may have been a bit of a problem on the primordial earth, because:
• Scientists can’t make nucleotides in the laboratory.
• In nature nucleotides are never produced except by living cells.
• If they did occur, they would not work because they would be mixed, right and left-handed. {Editor JW Schopf: Life’s Origin, Stanley L. Miller, and Antonio Lazcano, “Formation of the Building Blocks of Life,” 2002, p.98-100.}
Many biology books strip out these facts, leaving the impression that RNA forms in nature.
Some wander far from the truth and claim that experiments like that of Stanley Miller produced nucleotides along with the amino acids. {For example see: Holt, Annotated Teacher’s Edition, Biology, Visualizing Life, 1998, p. 192} One textbook I was reading recently told the innocent students a much worse whopper: “… RNA molecules can form spontaneously in water…” {George B. Johnson, Peter H. Raven, Biology, Principles & Explorations, Holt, Rinhehart and Winston, 1998 p. 230} Many highly intelligent origin of life researchers have dedicated much of their lives to vain attempts to make RNA. They must hate it when people like me compare their inability to make RNA to the far fetched claims in the textbooks that water, soup or clay can make make it.
Why do these textbooks use false statements to convince students that life started without a Creator? I don’t believe for a minute that the authors would falsify evidence if they had real evidence they could use instead. I believe they feel so compelled to convince students that that life began without the Creator that when they can’t do it with truth, they turn to other means. It makes me sad to see atheists use my tax dollars to spread their religion in public school books. It disturbs me even more when they deceive innocent kids with false statements like these. It makes me sadder still that our government permits them to establish atheism as the religion of the public schools. Students and their teachers have no idea that there is no evidence at all to back up the atheistic statements about the origin of life. They trust their textbooks and have no easy way to check up on them — unless you give them a copy of this booklet! It may be the only way you and I have to break the stranglehold of atheism on our schools.
To be fair I must admit that some authors did not know the statements they were writing were false. They were so convinced by other public school textbooks that RNA had formed in nature that they deduced a logical way in which it must have happened: The nucleotide building blocks formed in nature first, and then the RNA. After the idea had found its way into older biology books, {For example, Cecie Starr, Ralph Taggart, Biology, the Unity and Diversity of Life, 1989 p. 572-573} it was copied into newer books.{Holt, Annotated Teacher’s Edition, Biology, Visualizing Life, 1998, p. 192.}
Science textbooks should present evidence; not what may seem logical, or what some older schoolbook said. Fry, a philosopher and historian of science, instead of starting from a premise followed by logic, studied the work of all the most important first life researchers who have been trying to find a naturalistic method by which life could have started. She shows the result of their research:
"… other biochemical building blocks such as nucleotides and lipids, require for their synthesis a ‘real factory.’ … The synthesis of these substances involves a series of reactions, each reaction following the previous one in utmost accuracy." {Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth, 2000, p. 126, 176-177.}
Lipids and the nucleotide building blocks of RNA are only made by the real factories found in cells.
The authors of Rare Earth engage in a bit of atheistic speculation about life in space, but they tell the truth about RNA production:
“The abiotic synthesis of RNA remains the most enigmatic step in the evolution of the first life, for no one has yet succeeded in creating RNA” {Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth, Why complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, 2000, p. 65, see also 62-66}
“Some of the steps leading to the synthesis of DNA and RNA can be duplicated in the laboratory, others cannot. … The problem is that complex molecules such as DNA (and RNA) cannot simply be assembled in a glass jar by combining various chemicals. Such organic molecules also tend to break down when heated ….” {Rare Earth, p. 63, see also The RNA World, second edition, 1999, p. 68, 159, } I have looked in vain for such admissions in high school biology books which tend to skip all such evidence to the contrary, and claim or imply that RNA formed from chemicals in ways that first life researchers have found over and over again do not work.
Many older people who were first convinced by textbook claims that life started from lipid coacervates, were later convinced that life came from proteins. Now they are even more convinced that it came from RNA. At each stage, they had faith that whatever they had been led to believe was true science. Their faith, however, was never based on scientific evidence, but on the false claims of one made up story after another. Solid evidence that God created life is hard to come by because it is consistently censored out of the textbooks.
After textbooks spin the story that a primitive RNA had formed, they tell what it must have been like. Since it did not yet have the help of a cell, they deduce that it had to be able to do some things modern RNA does not do, and claim that it self replicated, catalyzed the formation of proteins, and later formed DNA.
Catalysts make chemical reactions happen that otherwise would not happen or would be millions of times slower. The catalytic ability of modern RNA, is very limited, and it certainly can’t make proteins, {The RNA World, second edition, 1999, p. 166-171 } but if it could, how could it know to make all the specific proteins needed for the first cell? Why make the hard ones? Why would it not just keep catalyzing more copies of one easy protein? Are we to believe that RNA could plan ahead?
A greater problem is, if RNA were successful at making a working first cell, and then was perfected at what it did by natural selection, why would natural selection throw out a system that was working to install another system even if that system had the potential to eventually become even better? Khomenko offers an analogy: If a man stands on top of a hill and wants to get any higher, he has first to come down into a valley and then climb a higher hill. {TJ 189(1) 2002, p. 79-80} Natural selection can not select valleys just because there are higher hills on the other side of them. In this case, unless one pretends that natural selection has Godlike abilities, it would have no idea which all left handed proteins would be needed or how to make them.
In addition, each protein will connect and function in only one place in its cell, and will not work unless it receives the exact information that will send it to that place. Dr. Guenter Blobel received a nobel prize for discovering the address tags which send each protein to the one place in the cell where it will work. {5 Tom A. Rapoport of Harvard Medical School, Science News, 10/16/99, Vol. 156 Issue 16, p 246. See also Britannica Biography Collection, Guenter Blobel.}
While a protein is on the way to the only spot where it will fit and connect with the proteins around it, it must fold to fit perfectly with the other proteins which will be its neighbors. Unless each protein is properly addressed and folded, it is not only useless, but it will usually cause a genetic disease. IBM is building the world’s most powerful super computer so scientists can understand how cells fold each protein into the unique shape which will let them fit with the surrounding proteins.
IBM writes: “The scientific community considers protein folding one of the most significant ‘grand challenges’ — a fundamental problem in science or engineering that has broad economic and scientific impact and whose solution can be advanced only by applying high-performance computing technologies.
Proteins control all cellular processes in the human body. Comprising strings of amino acids that are joined like links of a chain, a protein folds into a highly complex, three-dimensional shape that determines its function. Any change in shape dramatically alters the function of a protein, and even the slightest change in the folding process can turn a desirable protein into a disease.” {http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/press_release.html}
The fact that each protein receives information which sends it to the only spot where it can connect and that on the way it folds to fit that spot is evidence: not evidence for a series of lucky accidents, but that the system was set up by an intelligent Creator.
The plot thickens: For a cell to live, it is not enough for its proteins to be sent to the right places and folded correctly on the way, the cell must also maintain the right amount of each protein. This requires an elaborate control system that turns on and off every activity of the cell at the right time. {Susan Aldridge, The Thread of Life, The story of genes and genetic engineering, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 47-53.} If RNA produced proteins and did not stop making even one of them at the proper moment, it would jam the cell so full, that it would kill the cell. No cell could live after it started protein production without a control system to turn the production of each and every protein on and off at the right times. If a cell could produce proteins with no control systems in place, we could expect:
• Proteins with mixed right and left handed amino acids.
• Mostly the proteins which were easiest to make.
• Proteins which would not fold properly.
• Proteins without the proper address tags.
• Any proteins at all whose production the cell was not yet programmed to turn off.
• Proteins (and other chemicals) not useful to that cell.
For abiogenesis to be true, a whole series of things that do not happen without a designer because they cannot, would have to have happened. This not only indicates that life was not begun by chance, but that it was begun by an intelligent Creator. It is as if God had left clues for us to uncover. Don’t miss this one.
How Long?
Even atheists have long recognized that, the odds against abiogenesis are astronomical, but for years they thought that enough time was available to increase their odds. A very famous evolutionist of those days wrote this inspiring explanation: "Time is the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years.… Given so much time the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles." {George Wald, "The origin of Life", in The Physics and Chemistry of Life, 1955, p. 12.}
Evolutionists of that day believed that a huge amount of time had made it possible for life to start without a Creator. Almost no informed atheists believe that story today! Why?
• Lipids, proteins, DNA and RNA will not form in nature apart from already living cells, but once formed, all of them break down over time and would be no good after a long wait.
• Evolutionists tell us that Fossil bacteria have been dated at 3.55 billion years old. They are attached one to another in a string like shape, and look identical to some modern bacteria today. {Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth, Why complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, 2000, p. 57. See also Life’s Origin, p. 173}
When do evolutionists believe life might have begun? “… life could not have been established before the end of the period of heavy bombardment 3.8 billion years ago.” {P. F. Lurquin, The Origins of Life and the Universe,2003, p. 133.} Until then they believe that friction from the huge meteoric impacts that were forming the earth kept it much too hot. After that many evolutionists believe it took hundreds of millions of years of evolution to change the first primitive cell into the complex bacteria that left the fossils. The time that was left for chemicals to get together and make the first cell was so little that Nobel prize winner de Duve has written:
“It is now generally agreed that if life arose spontaneously by natural processes … it must have arisen fairly quickly, more in a matter of millennia or centuries, perhaps even less, than in millions of years." {Christian de Duve, "The Beginning of Life on Earth," American Scientist, Vol. 83, Sept-Oct. 1995, p. 428.}
If today’s evolutionists are right that it took very little time for chemicals to form the first cell, scientists should be able to make life in the lab. They can’t even make its RNA or DNA! They can’t even make the nucleotides they are made of!
It is discouraging to be an informed atheist these days. One writes that a chance origin for life commands less respect than it did a decade or two ago because of, “… the enormous improbability (not enough time and atoms for all the necessary trials).” {Franklin M. Harold, The way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life, 2001, p. 239, as cited in TJ 18(1) 2004}
If you still believe in one of the made up stories about lipids, proteins, or RNA having formed the first life, you can put that story into its proper perspective by adding this four word introduction: “Once upon a time!”
Information
The primary purpose of DNA and RNA is to store and transmit information. Like a blank piece of paper or a hard drive, DNA, and RNA are not limited to a single message. In computer terms, we can think of DNA and RNA as being the hardware, and the information that they contain as the software.
It is one thing to understand how a computer is made, and quite another to know where its software came from. Who wrote the system (the directions that tell the computer how to run)? Where did the information the computer stores and manages come from? Atheistic origin of life researchers are still struggling to find a way that the hardware could have come about by naturalistic means, that is without an intelligent Creator. So far, all I have seen them do with the problem of where the software came from is side step it. “If we can only show that the hardware had no Creator,” they seem to hope, the software would have taken care of itself. Hardly! Programmers write our systems and programs, then each of us types his own data into it. The information we know of comes only from minds, never from matter or energy:
• When an archeologist finds an ancient book or inscription, he knows someone wrote it. {Charles B. Thaxton, “In Pursuit of Intelligent Causes” Origins & Design, Summer 2001, p. 28-29} I know of no scientist who contests this.
• The SETI Institute uses huge radio telescopes to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their scientists know that if they find an intelligent message coming from space, it will prove that we are not alone in the universe, but there is other intelligent life out there. {For documentation and further discussion see Heinze, How Life Began, p. 102-103, 131-133}. The SETI scientists, including the ones who are atheists, count on there being no exceptions to the fact that information always comes from intelligent beings.
Books on the origin of life tend to skip over the software problem. Where did the information written in the genes of the first cell come from? They leave the vague impression that it grew out of clay or primordial soup, but why would either one have contained the information to make a cell?
Because atheists believe that cells evolved from chemicals, they have strong motivation to believe that the first cell was really simple, so they have done research to see how few genes a cell could have gotten by with and still had life: “The number is about 300 ….” {P. F. Lurquin, The Origins of Life and the Universe, 2003, p. 6} The DNA of a bacterium contains as much information as a 1000 page book {Lee M. Spetner, Not by Chance, 1998, p. 30} With these reference points, a cell so simple it only had 300 genes would probably have as much information as a 300 page book. Forget the hardware for now! Where did the first cell get the equivalent of around 300 pages of information?
To get around this, evolutionists write me with exotic new definitions of “information” that don’t involve information.
The principle definition of information in my dictionary is, "knowledge communicated or received…." The second is "knowledge gained through study…" {Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, 2000, p. 678.}
Cells contain and use knowledgeable instructions that work perfectly for making even the cell parts that scientists can’t yet make in the lab. If after years of study intelligent scientists are some day able to decode the instructions and make these materials in their own laboratories, will they have shown that cells received their information with no intelligent input? Hardly! The evidence clearly points to a very intelligent creator. It is because of their world view, not because of the evidence that Atheists claim the information in cells is an exception.
In the next section, the evidence that God created becomes even more specific, and easier to understand. Try to read it with an open mind!
Machines
In every case in which the origin of a machine is known, it was designed by an intelligent designer. This is true of the space shuttle but it is also true of your bicycle.
Cells are full tiny functioning machines called molecular machines. Their different parts work together to accomplish things that no one part can do by itself. The ribosomes, for example, are little machines that link amino acids together to make proteins. There are a number of ribosomes inside each cell. In each one, several kinds of proteins work together with RNA to form a molecular machine that links amino acids together to make proteins.
Making proteins, however would kill the cell if too much or too little of any one protein were made. The cell needs the right amount at the right time.
Completely different machines turn protein production on or off. One type uses specific stretches of DNA called regulatory DNA sequences. The DNA, however, can not turn protein production on or off by itself. Each regulatory DNA sequence works with a specific gene regulatory protein. The protein folds perfectly to fit the correct spot on the DNA, and work with it. DNA and protein working together form a machine that regulates the production of a protein by forming a switch that turns a gene for that protein on or off at the right times. {Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, Peter Walter,Essential Cell Biology, An Introduction to the Molecular Biology of the Cell, 1998, p. 259-262.} Neither the regulatory DNA sequences nor the regulatory proteins can do the job without the other.
To get to the right spot on the DNA, each of the regulatory proteins must have a fully functioning address tag that sends it to the only spot on the DNA where it will fit and function. On the way, it must be folded correctly. Otherwise it will not fit when it gets there. Atheists have faith that the molecular machines, unlike all other machines, just sort of popped up by accident with no intelligent input.
Now add this vital evidence: If the machine which makes proteins had been able to make them before the one that regulates them was in place, the run away production would have killed the cell. The regulator, in turn, is half protein, and would have been useless without protein production. The cell could not work until both machines were up and running. The same is true for many of the cell’s machines. They were designed to depend on one another. Neither could have existed before the other, so neither could have evolved unless the other was already in place.
Behe quotes Darwin as saying, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” {Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 1996, p. 24.} Behe calls any machine which would not work at all unless several parts were present and put together properly, “irreducibly complex.” Take away any part of a thing that is irreducibly complex, and it won’t work. Not only does the cell contain machines which in themselves are irreducibly complex, these machines must work together with other machines of the cell. Now, pay attention! If one could take away either the machines which make proteins, or the regulatory machines, not one of the cell’s many other machines would work either.
Schoolbooks which replace the scientific evidence with made up stories, are dumbing down students in order to support an atheistic religious world view.
Now ask yourself: Why do proteins connect to, and work in conjunction with, other proteins, RNA, DNA and Lipids to form working machines which will not work at all unless other machines are present and making their contribution to the life of the cell? It is because each cell contains in its library of information the directions for making the machines, and the instructions which make them work together. How did this information get into a functioning cellular library? How do the directions for making machines get into any database? Does the evidence show that such directions result from a number of lucky accidents undirected by any source of intelligence? No! Never! Such information only comes from an intelligent source. Each of the cell’s machines show at least as much evidence for an intelligent designer as do other machines. Even atheists admit that all other machines, from wheel barrows to washing machines, had intelligent designers. However, in the case of the molecular machines in cells, their prior commitment to materialism requires them to make an exception for the very worst example possible. If atheists claimed that a watch had come about by accident we might wonder at how they could believe something so contrary to the evidence, but making this claim for molecular machines is worse than making it for a watch that automatically resets itself by signals from a satellite. The molecular machines are even more complexly inter coordinated. If atheists want to get themselves into such an obvious conflict with reality, I probably should not complain, but why should they drag schoolbooks out onto such thin ice with them? Can’t they see that the ice is going to break? Sure, its possible to fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but this time they are going too far.
My prayer is that you, my readers, may understand, and act on your knowledge to let God bring you into the most wonderful of all relationships. May you fit with God like a regulatory protein fits the stretch of DNA it was made for.
Perhaps you are an atheist who until now has been able to believe made up anti scientific fables, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Now that you know, why choose the way of death over the way that leads to God. Jesus said, “Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake.” (John 14:11) Jesus was speaking of the miracles those who were listening had seen him do. The creation of life is another of God’s works that should lead us to believe in God.
I am sure that when many of you who are atheists rejected God, you were convinced that you were following science. Now you know! If you don’t know, reread this booklet or my book, How Life Began. Both the scientific evidence which they lay out before you, and the Creator’s message to us, the Bible show that an intelligent Designer and Creator made living things. Why put the made up myths of atheism ahead of both science and the Bible? Other than hell, what will you get out of it? Even if everything ended with this life, once you have finished helping tear the Ten Commandments from the schoolhouse walls, and banishing God and His insistence that we love one another from the schools and society, what do you have left to show us how we should treat each other? Natural selection and its survival of the fittest? The famous shooter at Columbine High School in Colorado came dressed for the slaughter wearing a tee shirt with the wording: “Survival of the fittest!” If he had come wearing the ten commandments, many schools would have sent him home. Will your life be happier if you are constantly looking over your shoulder for an atheist who is more fit than you and will take you out?
God lives. The evidence for it is abundant. He loves you, and wants you to love Him. The Bible not only tells us that God created living things. It tells us how to have a personal relationship with Him. How? First God gave His law which explained how to live. Mankind did not live that way, and the law condemns that. That’s why people are taking down the ten commandments wherever they can. All of us have sinned. The law condemns sin and makes it clear that we are all guilty. Read it. Later, God came to earth as the Son, Jesus Christ. When He came, people had no room for Him, so He was born in a manger. When He was older, those He came to save treated him badly and then killed him. But Jesus came with a purpose: He came to die on the cross, and take our condemnation on Himself, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16). Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Unlike Darwin, or the founders of any of the other religions, Jesus Christ rose from the dead. His tomb is empty. He is alive, and He wants you to trust Him to save you from the just judgment for your sins.
At this moment, while you know the truth, don’t harden your heart against your Creator. Come to Him through Jesus Christ, the way God prepared for you. Confess your sins to God. Jesus Christ died to save you from every one of them, and rose again to prove it, and to have fellowship with His people.
If you doubt because you have been sucking at the dry breasts of the skeptics for your information about the Bible, quit! Read God’s word itself without the poison of their contamination. Your loving God will speak to your heart and lead you to Himself. I suggest that you start in the New Testament with the Gospel of John, then read Acts, then back to Genesis, the first book in the Old Testament, and back to read another of the gospels. Along the way, read these short passages which explain salvation: Ephesians 2:8-10; Galations 2:16, 21, 3:11-13; 1John 5:11-12.
With that introduction, you will have a feel for God’s word, and can embark with delight on the life long adventure of letting God lead you in reading His word so you can live by it.
http://www.creationism.org/heinze/Life.htm
by Thomas F. Heinze, revised July 2004
Spontaneous Generation?
“The scientific principle that life only comes from life is called Biogenesis.” {Essenfeld, Gontang, Moore, Addison-Wesley Biology, 1996, p. 223} It states that spontaneous generation does not happen, instead, every living thing has come from some other living thing. It is one of the best proved scientific principles, sometimes called the Law of Biogenesis. Even the most atheistic schoolbook authors admit that all the scientific evidence, both observational and experimental, upholds this basic scientific principle. More and more school books, however, are now claiming that there once was an exception to this basic principle of science; that a first living cell came about as very complex chemicals evolved and formed life without the help of a Creator. Since this is spontaneous generation, and almost everyone now knows that spontaneous generation is anti scientific, the name has been changed to “abiogenesis” which comes from roots which mean: “not biogenesis”. You may be thinking,“So there are two views on where life came from, so what?”
If the Biology textbooks are right, there is no God who created living things, and it follows that there is no heaven or hell! What should we live for, and what should be our moral standards? Here is a typical atheistic response: “It is very hard to admit that there is only one single reason for each of us to come into this world: to transmit our DNA to the next generation. There is absolutely no other purpose for us to be born.” {Maxim D. Frank-Kamenetskii, Unraveling DNA, 1997, p. 130.}
If this is right, any moral rules that limit our sexual activity hinder us in accomplishing the “one single reason for each of us to come into this world”. Hollywood is a leader in exporting the new moral standards throughout the world. Some Middle Eastern Muslims go to the movies and think they have understood American culture. They call America “the great Satan,” and are willing to strap on bombs and give their lives to strike back at us. Why not? They believe that in death they will be rewarded with 72 virgins. Some western men, thankful that Hollywood and the schools are desensitizing girls to sin, are going after their 72 virgins in the here and now.
I started studying the origin of life to compare the scientific evidence that favors an intelligent Creator with that which favors abiogenesis. I had read about the subject a good deal, so I went into the study believing that I would find more scientific evidence favoring an intelligent living Creator who designed and made life, than that which supports abiogenesis. I was also influenced by the fact that I read the Bible every day. It explains that God created certain categories of living things. In addition, years ago at Oregon State College, I accepted God’s offer of salvation based on the fact that Christ paid for my sins, and since then have seen Him doing all kinds of things in my own life and the lives of other Christians. Knowing God and having found Him trustworthy increased my expectation that I would find more evidence that life was created by an intelligent and capable designer than I would find supporting abiogenesis.
In spite of all this, I was not prepared for what I found! After reading book after book promoting abiogenesis, some written by expert origin of life researchers, it began to dawn on me that I had not found a single book that gave even one shred of scientific evidence that life had begun by abiogenesis. I have a request out on this website for anyone who knows of any to let me know, and no one has. Compelled by their faith in the atheistic idea that God did not create life, the authors of books promoting abiogenesis support their thesis with speculation, made up fables, and scenarios instead of evidence.
As I searched, I was able to find a great deal of scientific evidence, but it was against abiogenesis, and for an intelligent Creator. As you read ahead, watch as I pile the evidence before you; first evidence against abiogenesis, and then evidence for an intelligent planner and Creator.
There is a great deal of solid evidence, but I have had to look beyond the textbooks to find it. First life researchers, for example, who have tried for years without success to make a cell, or even just one of its components in their laboratories face a problem. They may be atheists and want abiogenesis to have happened, but if they repeat the made up stories textbooks use to convince students that life, or some step toward life happens easily, why can’t they make it happen in their labs? Are they incompetent? If they give that impression, financing for their research will dry up. With motivation like that, researchers sometimes present real scientific evidence instead of making abiogenesis sound easy.
The same is true when a scientist holds a new or minority position on some point because the majority position really won’t work. If he doesn’t point out the holes in the dominant theory, why should anyone accept his replacement for it? When we look for it, the truth shows up.
Were the materials cells are made of available?
Cells are known for their very large molecules such as proteins, DNA, and RNA. For a cell to form without a Creator, these things, or at least their components would have to have been available. Reasonable atheists admit this: “If life indeed started without the help of miracles, the first organisms must have been made of materials that were easily available.” {Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth, 2000, p. 127.} This obvious fact puts textbook authors who oppose the Creator in a terrible bind because, as we will see, the very large molecules cells are made of never form in nature, except in already living cells. DNA and RNA can’t even be made in the lab!
Since they can’t support their position with evidence, many textbook authors who don’t believe that God created living things, back up their statements about how life might have happened with made up stories. Let’s examine a few of the most popular stories of how life began by abiogenesis in the order in which they became popular. Notice that each of these stories claims that life started with different chemical. Not one of these chemicals will form in nature except in already living cells:
The myth that Lipids formed in nature and produced the first life
If you pour a little oil in water and shake it up, the oil separates into little round balls called coacervates. Chemists call oils and fats “lipids.” In the days when microscopes were still too crude to give much idea of the complexity of cells, some people thought that these tiny bubbles of fat must have evolved into cells. Here is an example:
“When mixed with water, certain lipids will form a bubble that is called a coacervate (koh AS uhr vayt) which has a double-layered membrane much like the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane.… The early oceans probably contained numerous small lipid coacervates, each one forming and then dispersing. Over millions of years, coacervates that could survive longer by taking in molecules and energy from their surroundings would have become more common than the here-today-gone-tomorrow kind. When a means arose to transfer this ability to “offspring” coacervates, probably through self-replicating RNA, life had begun.” {Holt, Annotated Teacher’s Edition, Biology, Visualizing Life, 1998, p. 194} This simplistic little made up story is contrary to the evidence!
Both lipids and RNA are too complex to form in nature, so the statement that both formed at the same time, and in the same place with the RNA inside a lipid membrane is also false. Here is a quote by Cairns-Smith, one of the most prominent first life researchers which explains that lipids, and the nucleotides which make up RNA are only formed in the miniature factories of already living cells:
"Though a few organic substances - for instance certain simple amino acids - can form fairly easily under prebiotic conditions, other biochemical building blocks such as nucleotides and lipids, require for their synthesis a ‘real factory.’ … The synthesis of these substances involves a series of reactions, each reaction following the previous one in utmost accuracy." {Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth, 2000, p. 126, 176-177; Quoting Cairns-Smith, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, 1985, p. 126.}
Notice that lipids are not produced in nature except by already living cells. Therefore, the story that lipid coacervates produced or helped produce the first cell is simply not true. Since this also applies to nucleotides, the building blocks of RNA, the story in Biology, Visualizing Life is false in this point also. But millions read textbooks, and who reads an origin of life researcher like Cairns-Smith? Few if any of the kids and teachers that you know will ever discover the truth unless you give them copies of this booklet.
There was another false statement in the schoolbook quote. Did you catch it?
“Over millions of years, coacervates that could survive longer by taking in molecules and energy from their surroundings would have become more common than the here-today-gone-tomorrow kind.”
Is this true? Does natural selection work on chemicals like lipids? No, it works on living things that can keep track of information, reproduce, and pass the information on to their offspring. { James P. Ferris, “From Building Blocks to the Polymers of Life,” in Life’s Origin, Editor: JW Schopf, 2002, p.136} While lipid coacervates did not exist till living things made them, they have been around for a considerable period of time, and have not evolved as claimed.
Though there was no source of lipids before real cells were present to make them, lipids would still have been vital to a first cell because cell membranes are made of lipids. Whatever cell part an atheist wants to believe came first, if it did not have a functioning membrane surrounding it, the other parts would just have just been so much loose goo dissolving into the ocean. The proposed membrane, however, must do much more than keep the cell’s parts together. If a cell is to live, its membrane must also let in nourishment while keeping out unwanted materials and expelling wastes. Lipids can’t do all this alone, so real cell membranes also contain pumps and channels which are made of proteins. {Bruce Alberts, etc. Essential Cell Biology, An Introduction to the Molecular Biology of the Cell, 1998, p. 347.}
The myth that proteins formed in nature, and produced life
Stanley Miller showed in his famous experiment in 1953 that amino acids could be formed under conditions that might have occurred in nature. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins which are the main ingredients of living things, so After Miller’s experiment, false but convincing stories were made up about amino acids produced in nature linking to form proteins and combining with DNA to form living things. In nature, proteins are only produced by already living cells, never by amino acids spontaneously linking together. Tied to this story about proteins, Miller’s experiment became the most widely publicized origin of life experiment of all time, even though in nature, proteins are only made by already living cells.
Before Miller, Oparin had worked with “proteinoids,” which also received a lot of hype, but the amino acids in proteins are hooked together one behind the next, like cars in a train, or pearls on a string, while Oparin’s proteinoids were small spheres which will not work in living things
Leslie Orgel is one of the foremost origin of life scientists today. He contributed a chapter, “The Origin of Biological Information” to the book, Life’s Origin. His chapter explains nothing about what one would expect after reading the title, but what he says about the materials needed to produce cells is very revealing. Orgel says organic chemists should have invented the computer scientist’s motto, “Garbage in, garbage out,” because if they have garbage rather than a pure compound going into an experiment, garbage is what will come out. While school text books used Miller’s famous experiment to convince students that chemicals built up and became life, Orgel uses the same experiment to show that what Miller got was garbage: “For example, Miller’s classic experiment (discussed in chapter 3) produces tar along with a percent or two of a complex mixture of racemic amino acids … .” {Leslie E. Orgel, “The Origin of Biological Information,” from the bookLife’s Origin, edited by J. William Shopf, 2002, p. 140.}
In this short explanation, Orgel says three things:
• Miller’s experiment, the most famous of all origin of life experiments, produced all garbage except for a percent or two of the desired amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins, the main ingredients of cells.
• The amino acids that made up that percent or two were “Racemic,” which means mixed right and left handed. Proteins will not work in cells unless all their amino acids are left handed, but amino acids made in nature or in experiments that simulate nature are half left, and half right-handed, and will not work in proteins. Even if there had been a way to produce all left-handed amino acids, they gradually break down to half and half. {See my book How Life Began, p. 15-16 for explanation and documentation.} Half and half won’t work, but neither will 90% left handed amino acids, or 99%. Since only pure left-handed amino acids will work in living things, {Life’s Origin, p. 73, 151} the percent or two of amino acids that were also produced were nicer garbage, but still garbage that would not work in living cells.
Orgel points these things out to help us understand that unless there is a way that nature can produce a pure enough form of the building blocks of protein to be useful, it is hard to see how any proteins produced could be used in a cell. He illustrates with amino acids to spotlight the problem of producing functional RNA which is almost infinitely more difficult. He asks: “How could chemistry on the primitive Earth proceed in such a messy way, producing information rich living cells, those exquisitely designed chemical factories, from such unpromising starting materials? This is the central and as yet largely unanswered question facing investigators on the origin of life.” {Editor: JW Schopf, Life’s Origin, Leslie E. Orgel, 2002, p. 140.} Orgel goes on to look at attempts that have been made to solve the problem of getting anything that could possibly serve to form cells, but concludes the chapter lamenting the very large gap that separates the huge molecules of RNA from the small molecules of non living things.{Life’s Origin, Leslie E. Orgel, “The Origin of Biological Information” 2002,p. 154.}
Another problem is that without the little factory of the living cell, amino acids will not link together one after another to form proteins. Even when scientists buy all left-handed amino acids at a chemical supply house and make a perfect organic broth, no proteins are produced. Even some school books now admit:
"Scientists have not been able to cause amino acids dissolved in water to join together to form proteins. The energy-requiring chemical reactions that join amino acids are reversible and do not occur spontaneously in water. However, most scientists no longer argue that the first proteins assembled spontaneously. Instead, they now tell us that the initial macromolecules were composed of RNA, and that RNA later catalyzed the formation of proteins."{George B. Johnson, Peter H. Raven, Biology, Principles & Explorations, Holt, Rinhehart and Winston, 1996 p. 235}
Most of those who rejected their Creator to trust the made up stories that proteins or lipids formed the first life have since abandoned these stories to trust in:
The myth that the first living cell was started by RNA.
Andrew Knoll, a professor at Harvard explains an obstacle to the claim that RNA was the material from which life was formed: No RNA or its building blocks were available:
“Worst of all, even if we could produce the right components, combining them to form nucleotides, the building blocks of nucleic acids, is daunting. To date, no one has figured out how to do it.”
Knoll is admitting here that no one can yet make the nucleotides which are the building blocks of RNA and DNA. Even if a scientist had all the right parts to start out with he could not put them together to make even the nucleotide building blocks of RNA, let alone RNA itself.
Knoll’s quote continues: “There is still another difficulty. Nucleotides are chiral molecules, which is to say that they come in two forms which are mirror images of each other—like your hands. RNA can be built from right-handed or left-handed molecules, but mixed chains won’t grow. How then could RNA—which in cells consists exclusively of right handed nucleotides—have emerged from a fifty-fifty mixture of left- and right-handed building blocks? Again, no one knows.
The problems are so difficult that many researchers have given up on the idea that RNA was the primordial molecule of life.” {Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Earth, 2003, p. 79.}
Others, instead of joining those who have given up on RNA, and searching for a simpler molecule on which life might have been built, claim that RNA may have formed on some clay which served as a template on which RNA was built. They cite experiments which have shown that when fresh building blocks of RNA (nucleotides) are placed on clay daily, some will connect together to form short strings. {Editor: JW Schopf, Life’s Origin,James P. Ferris, “From Building Blocks to the Polymers of Life,” 2002, p. 123.} Finding a scientist who would have been able to place fresh nucleotides on the clay daily before there were any living cells to produce the nucleotides may have been a bit of a problem on the primordial earth, because:
• Scientists can’t make nucleotides in the laboratory.
• In nature nucleotides are never produced except by living cells.
• If they did occur, they would not work because they would be mixed, right and left-handed. {Editor JW Schopf: Life’s Origin, Stanley L. Miller, and Antonio Lazcano, “Formation of the Building Blocks of Life,” 2002, p.98-100.}
Many biology books strip out these facts, leaving the impression that RNA forms in nature.
Some wander far from the truth and claim that experiments like that of Stanley Miller produced nucleotides along with the amino acids. {For example see: Holt, Annotated Teacher’s Edition, Biology, Visualizing Life, 1998, p. 192} One textbook I was reading recently told the innocent students a much worse whopper: “… RNA molecules can form spontaneously in water…” {George B. Johnson, Peter H. Raven, Biology, Principles & Explorations, Holt, Rinhehart and Winston, 1998 p. 230} Many highly intelligent origin of life researchers have dedicated much of their lives to vain attempts to make RNA. They must hate it when people like me compare their inability to make RNA to the far fetched claims in the textbooks that water, soup or clay can make make it.
Why do these textbooks use false statements to convince students that life started without a Creator? I don’t believe for a minute that the authors would falsify evidence if they had real evidence they could use instead. I believe they feel so compelled to convince students that that life began without the Creator that when they can’t do it with truth, they turn to other means. It makes me sad to see atheists use my tax dollars to spread their religion in public school books. It disturbs me even more when they deceive innocent kids with false statements like these. It makes me sadder still that our government permits them to establish atheism as the religion of the public schools. Students and their teachers have no idea that there is no evidence at all to back up the atheistic statements about the origin of life. They trust their textbooks and have no easy way to check up on them — unless you give them a copy of this booklet! It may be the only way you and I have to break the stranglehold of atheism on our schools.
To be fair I must admit that some authors did not know the statements they were writing were false. They were so convinced by other public school textbooks that RNA had formed in nature that they deduced a logical way in which it must have happened: The nucleotide building blocks formed in nature first, and then the RNA. After the idea had found its way into older biology books, {For example, Cecie Starr, Ralph Taggart, Biology, the Unity and Diversity of Life, 1989 p. 572-573} it was copied into newer books.{Holt, Annotated Teacher’s Edition, Biology, Visualizing Life, 1998, p. 192.}
Science textbooks should present evidence; not what may seem logical, or what some older schoolbook said. Fry, a philosopher and historian of science, instead of starting from a premise followed by logic, studied the work of all the most important first life researchers who have been trying to find a naturalistic method by which life could have started. She shows the result of their research:
"… other biochemical building blocks such as nucleotides and lipids, require for their synthesis a ‘real factory.’ … The synthesis of these substances involves a series of reactions, each reaction following the previous one in utmost accuracy." {Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth, 2000, p. 126, 176-177.}
Lipids and the nucleotide building blocks of RNA are only made by the real factories found in cells.
The authors of Rare Earth engage in a bit of atheistic speculation about life in space, but they tell the truth about RNA production:
“The abiotic synthesis of RNA remains the most enigmatic step in the evolution of the first life, for no one has yet succeeded in creating RNA” {Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth, Why complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, 2000, p. 65, see also 62-66}
“Some of the steps leading to the synthesis of DNA and RNA can be duplicated in the laboratory, others cannot. … The problem is that complex molecules such as DNA (and RNA) cannot simply be assembled in a glass jar by combining various chemicals. Such organic molecules also tend to break down when heated ….” {Rare Earth, p. 63, see also The RNA World, second edition, 1999, p. 68, 159, } I have looked in vain for such admissions in high school biology books which tend to skip all such evidence to the contrary, and claim or imply that RNA formed from chemicals in ways that first life researchers have found over and over again do not work.
Many older people who were first convinced by textbook claims that life started from lipid coacervates, were later convinced that life came from proteins. Now they are even more convinced that it came from RNA. At each stage, they had faith that whatever they had been led to believe was true science. Their faith, however, was never based on scientific evidence, but on the false claims of one made up story after another. Solid evidence that God created life is hard to come by because it is consistently censored out of the textbooks.
After textbooks spin the story that a primitive RNA had formed, they tell what it must have been like. Since it did not yet have the help of a cell, they deduce that it had to be able to do some things modern RNA does not do, and claim that it self replicated, catalyzed the formation of proteins, and later formed DNA.
Catalysts make chemical reactions happen that otherwise would not happen or would be millions of times slower. The catalytic ability of modern RNA, is very limited, and it certainly can’t make proteins, {The RNA World, second edition, 1999, p. 166-171 } but if it could, how could it know to make all the specific proteins needed for the first cell? Why make the hard ones? Why would it not just keep catalyzing more copies of one easy protein? Are we to believe that RNA could plan ahead?
A greater problem is, if RNA were successful at making a working first cell, and then was perfected at what it did by natural selection, why would natural selection throw out a system that was working to install another system even if that system had the potential to eventually become even better? Khomenko offers an analogy: If a man stands on top of a hill and wants to get any higher, he has first to come down into a valley and then climb a higher hill. {TJ 189(1) 2002, p. 79-80} Natural selection can not select valleys just because there are higher hills on the other side of them. In this case, unless one pretends that natural selection has Godlike abilities, it would have no idea which all left handed proteins would be needed or how to make them.
In addition, each protein will connect and function in only one place in its cell, and will not work unless it receives the exact information that will send it to that place. Dr. Guenter Blobel received a nobel prize for discovering the address tags which send each protein to the one place in the cell where it will work. {5 Tom A. Rapoport of Harvard Medical School, Science News, 10/16/99, Vol. 156 Issue 16, p 246. See also Britannica Biography Collection, Guenter Blobel.}
While a protein is on the way to the only spot where it will fit and connect with the proteins around it, it must fold to fit perfectly with the other proteins which will be its neighbors. Unless each protein is properly addressed and folded, it is not only useless, but it will usually cause a genetic disease. IBM is building the world’s most powerful super computer so scientists can understand how cells fold each protein into the unique shape which will let them fit with the surrounding proteins.
IBM writes: “The scientific community considers protein folding one of the most significant ‘grand challenges’ — a fundamental problem in science or engineering that has broad economic and scientific impact and whose solution can be advanced only by applying high-performance computing technologies.
Proteins control all cellular processes in the human body. Comprising strings of amino acids that are joined like links of a chain, a protein folds into a highly complex, three-dimensional shape that determines its function. Any change in shape dramatically alters the function of a protein, and even the slightest change in the folding process can turn a desirable protein into a disease.” {http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/press_release.html}
The fact that each protein receives information which sends it to the only spot where it can connect and that on the way it folds to fit that spot is evidence: not evidence for a series of lucky accidents, but that the system was set up by an intelligent Creator.
The plot thickens: For a cell to live, it is not enough for its proteins to be sent to the right places and folded correctly on the way, the cell must also maintain the right amount of each protein. This requires an elaborate control system that turns on and off every activity of the cell at the right time. {Susan Aldridge, The Thread of Life, The story of genes and genetic engineering, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 47-53.} If RNA produced proteins and did not stop making even one of them at the proper moment, it would jam the cell so full, that it would kill the cell. No cell could live after it started protein production without a control system to turn the production of each and every protein on and off at the right times. If a cell could produce proteins with no control systems in place, we could expect:
• Proteins with mixed right and left handed amino acids.
• Mostly the proteins which were easiest to make.
• Proteins which would not fold properly.
• Proteins without the proper address tags.
• Any proteins at all whose production the cell was not yet programmed to turn off.
• Proteins (and other chemicals) not useful to that cell.
For abiogenesis to be true, a whole series of things that do not happen without a designer because they cannot, would have to have happened. This not only indicates that life was not begun by chance, but that it was begun by an intelligent Creator. It is as if God had left clues for us to uncover. Don’t miss this one.
How Long?
Even atheists have long recognized that, the odds against abiogenesis are astronomical, but for years they thought that enough time was available to increase their odds. A very famous evolutionist of those days wrote this inspiring explanation: "Time is the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years.… Given so much time the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles." {George Wald, "The origin of Life", in The Physics and Chemistry of Life, 1955, p. 12.}
Evolutionists of that day believed that a huge amount of time had made it possible for life to start without a Creator. Almost no informed atheists believe that story today! Why?
• Lipids, proteins, DNA and RNA will not form in nature apart from already living cells, but once formed, all of them break down over time and would be no good after a long wait.
• Evolutionists tell us that Fossil bacteria have been dated at 3.55 billion years old. They are attached one to another in a string like shape, and look identical to some modern bacteria today. {Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth, Why complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, 2000, p. 57. See also Life’s Origin, p. 173}
When do evolutionists believe life might have begun? “… life could not have been established before the end of the period of heavy bombardment 3.8 billion years ago.” {P. F. Lurquin, The Origins of Life and the Universe,2003, p. 133.} Until then they believe that friction from the huge meteoric impacts that were forming the earth kept it much too hot. After that many evolutionists believe it took hundreds of millions of years of evolution to change the first primitive cell into the complex bacteria that left the fossils. The time that was left for chemicals to get together and make the first cell was so little that Nobel prize winner de Duve has written:
“It is now generally agreed that if life arose spontaneously by natural processes … it must have arisen fairly quickly, more in a matter of millennia or centuries, perhaps even less, than in millions of years." {Christian de Duve, "The Beginning of Life on Earth," American Scientist, Vol. 83, Sept-Oct. 1995, p. 428.}
If today’s evolutionists are right that it took very little time for chemicals to form the first cell, scientists should be able to make life in the lab. They can’t even make its RNA or DNA! They can’t even make the nucleotides they are made of!
It is discouraging to be an informed atheist these days. One writes that a chance origin for life commands less respect than it did a decade or two ago because of, “… the enormous improbability (not enough time and atoms for all the necessary trials).” {Franklin M. Harold, The way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life, 2001, p. 239, as cited in TJ 18(1) 2004}
If you still believe in one of the made up stories about lipids, proteins, or RNA having formed the first life, you can put that story into its proper perspective by adding this four word introduction: “Once upon a time!”
Information
The primary purpose of DNA and RNA is to store and transmit information. Like a blank piece of paper or a hard drive, DNA, and RNA are not limited to a single message. In computer terms, we can think of DNA and RNA as being the hardware, and the information that they contain as the software.
It is one thing to understand how a computer is made, and quite another to know where its software came from. Who wrote the system (the directions that tell the computer how to run)? Where did the information the computer stores and manages come from? Atheistic origin of life researchers are still struggling to find a way that the hardware could have come about by naturalistic means, that is without an intelligent Creator. So far, all I have seen them do with the problem of where the software came from is side step it. “If we can only show that the hardware had no Creator,” they seem to hope, the software would have taken care of itself. Hardly! Programmers write our systems and programs, then each of us types his own data into it. The information we know of comes only from minds, never from matter or energy:
• When an archeologist finds an ancient book or inscription, he knows someone wrote it. {Charles B. Thaxton, “In Pursuit of Intelligent Causes” Origins & Design, Summer 2001, p. 28-29} I know of no scientist who contests this.
• The SETI Institute uses huge radio telescopes to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their scientists know that if they find an intelligent message coming from space, it will prove that we are not alone in the universe, but there is other intelligent life out there. {For documentation and further discussion see Heinze, How Life Began, p. 102-103, 131-133}. The SETI scientists, including the ones who are atheists, count on there being no exceptions to the fact that information always comes from intelligent beings.
Books on the origin of life tend to skip over the software problem. Where did the information written in the genes of the first cell come from? They leave the vague impression that it grew out of clay or primordial soup, but why would either one have contained the information to make a cell?
Because atheists believe that cells evolved from chemicals, they have strong motivation to believe that the first cell was really simple, so they have done research to see how few genes a cell could have gotten by with and still had life: “The number is about 300 ….” {P. F. Lurquin, The Origins of Life and the Universe, 2003, p. 6} The DNA of a bacterium contains as much information as a 1000 page book {Lee M. Spetner, Not by Chance, 1998, p. 30} With these reference points, a cell so simple it only had 300 genes would probably have as much information as a 300 page book. Forget the hardware for now! Where did the first cell get the equivalent of around 300 pages of information?
To get around this, evolutionists write me with exotic new definitions of “information” that don’t involve information.
The principle definition of information in my dictionary is, "knowledge communicated or received…." The second is "knowledge gained through study…" {Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, 2000, p. 678.}
Cells contain and use knowledgeable instructions that work perfectly for making even the cell parts that scientists can’t yet make in the lab. If after years of study intelligent scientists are some day able to decode the instructions and make these materials in their own laboratories, will they have shown that cells received their information with no intelligent input? Hardly! The evidence clearly points to a very intelligent creator. It is because of their world view, not because of the evidence that Atheists claim the information in cells is an exception.
In the next section, the evidence that God created becomes even more specific, and easier to understand. Try to read it with an open mind!
Machines
In every case in which the origin of a machine is known, it was designed by an intelligent designer. This is true of the space shuttle but it is also true of your bicycle.
Cells are full tiny functioning machines called molecular machines. Their different parts work together to accomplish things that no one part can do by itself. The ribosomes, for example, are little machines that link amino acids together to make proteins. There are a number of ribosomes inside each cell. In each one, several kinds of proteins work together with RNA to form a molecular machine that links amino acids together to make proteins.
Making proteins, however would kill the cell if too much or too little of any one protein were made. The cell needs the right amount at the right time.
Completely different machines turn protein production on or off. One type uses specific stretches of DNA called regulatory DNA sequences. The DNA, however, can not turn protein production on or off by itself. Each regulatory DNA sequence works with a specific gene regulatory protein. The protein folds perfectly to fit the correct spot on the DNA, and work with it. DNA and protein working together form a machine that regulates the production of a protein by forming a switch that turns a gene for that protein on or off at the right times. {Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, Peter Walter,Essential Cell Biology, An Introduction to the Molecular Biology of the Cell, 1998, p. 259-262.} Neither the regulatory DNA sequences nor the regulatory proteins can do the job without the other.
To get to the right spot on the DNA, each of the regulatory proteins must have a fully functioning address tag that sends it to the only spot on the DNA where it will fit and function. On the way, it must be folded correctly. Otherwise it will not fit when it gets there. Atheists have faith that the molecular machines, unlike all other machines, just sort of popped up by accident with no intelligent input.
Now add this vital evidence: If the machine which makes proteins had been able to make them before the one that regulates them was in place, the run away production would have killed the cell. The regulator, in turn, is half protein, and would have been useless without protein production. The cell could not work until both machines were up and running. The same is true for many of the cell’s machines. They were designed to depend on one another. Neither could have existed before the other, so neither could have evolved unless the other was already in place.
Behe quotes Darwin as saying, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” {Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 1996, p. 24.} Behe calls any machine which would not work at all unless several parts were present and put together properly, “irreducibly complex.” Take away any part of a thing that is irreducibly complex, and it won’t work. Not only does the cell contain machines which in themselves are irreducibly complex, these machines must work together with other machines of the cell. Now, pay attention! If one could take away either the machines which make proteins, or the regulatory machines, not one of the cell’s many other machines would work either.
Schoolbooks which replace the scientific evidence with made up stories, are dumbing down students in order to support an atheistic religious world view.
Now ask yourself: Why do proteins connect to, and work in conjunction with, other proteins, RNA, DNA and Lipids to form working machines which will not work at all unless other machines are present and making their contribution to the life of the cell? It is because each cell contains in its library of information the directions for making the machines, and the instructions which make them work together. How did this information get into a functioning cellular library? How do the directions for making machines get into any database? Does the evidence show that such directions result from a number of lucky accidents undirected by any source of intelligence? No! Never! Such information only comes from an intelligent source. Each of the cell’s machines show at least as much evidence for an intelligent designer as do other machines. Even atheists admit that all other machines, from wheel barrows to washing machines, had intelligent designers. However, in the case of the molecular machines in cells, their prior commitment to materialism requires them to make an exception for the very worst example possible. If atheists claimed that a watch had come about by accident we might wonder at how they could believe something so contrary to the evidence, but making this claim for molecular machines is worse than making it for a watch that automatically resets itself by signals from a satellite. The molecular machines are even more complexly inter coordinated. If atheists want to get themselves into such an obvious conflict with reality, I probably should not complain, but why should they drag schoolbooks out onto such thin ice with them? Can’t they see that the ice is going to break? Sure, its possible to fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but this time they are going too far.
My prayer is that you, my readers, may understand, and act on your knowledge to let God bring you into the most wonderful of all relationships. May you fit with God like a regulatory protein fits the stretch of DNA it was made for.
Perhaps you are an atheist who until now has been able to believe made up anti scientific fables, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Now that you know, why choose the way of death over the way that leads to God. Jesus said, “Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake.” (John 14:11) Jesus was speaking of the miracles those who were listening had seen him do. The creation of life is another of God’s works that should lead us to believe in God.
I am sure that when many of you who are atheists rejected God, you were convinced that you were following science. Now you know! If you don’t know, reread this booklet or my book, How Life Began. Both the scientific evidence which they lay out before you, and the Creator’s message to us, the Bible show that an intelligent Designer and Creator made living things. Why put the made up myths of atheism ahead of both science and the Bible? Other than hell, what will you get out of it? Even if everything ended with this life, once you have finished helping tear the Ten Commandments from the schoolhouse walls, and banishing God and His insistence that we love one another from the schools and society, what do you have left to show us how we should treat each other? Natural selection and its survival of the fittest? The famous shooter at Columbine High School in Colorado came dressed for the slaughter wearing a tee shirt with the wording: “Survival of the fittest!” If he had come wearing the ten commandments, many schools would have sent him home. Will your life be happier if you are constantly looking over your shoulder for an atheist who is more fit than you and will take you out?
God lives. The evidence for it is abundant. He loves you, and wants you to love Him. The Bible not only tells us that God created living things. It tells us how to have a personal relationship with Him. How? First God gave His law which explained how to live. Mankind did not live that way, and the law condemns that. That’s why people are taking down the ten commandments wherever they can. All of us have sinned. The law condemns sin and makes it clear that we are all guilty. Read it. Later, God came to earth as the Son, Jesus Christ. When He came, people had no room for Him, so He was born in a manger. When He was older, those He came to save treated him badly and then killed him. But Jesus came with a purpose: He came to die on the cross, and take our condemnation on Himself, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16). Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Unlike Darwin, or the founders of any of the other religions, Jesus Christ rose from the dead. His tomb is empty. He is alive, and He wants you to trust Him to save you from the just judgment for your sins.
At this moment, while you know the truth, don’t harden your heart against your Creator. Come to Him through Jesus Christ, the way God prepared for you. Confess your sins to God. Jesus Christ died to save you from every one of them, and rose again to prove it, and to have fellowship with His people.
If you doubt because you have been sucking at the dry breasts of the skeptics for your information about the Bible, quit! Read God’s word itself without the poison of their contamination. Your loving God will speak to your heart and lead you to Himself. I suggest that you start in the New Testament with the Gospel of John, then read Acts, then back to Genesis, the first book in the Old Testament, and back to read another of the gospels. Along the way, read these short passages which explain salvation: Ephesians 2:8-10; Galations 2:16, 21, 3:11-13; 1John 5:11-12.
With that introduction, you will have a feel for God’s word, and can embark with delight on the life long adventure of letting God lead you in reading His word so you can live by it.
