Playing the Odds in the Origin of Life

Ever hear of an oddsmaker? It's someone who predicts the outcomes of games, contests, and sets the odds for betting. "Ten dollars on Snorting Sally in the fourth at 8:5". If you go to a casino, spend some time beforehand and look up your odds of winning — usually quite poor. You may do better at poker because you have human competitors and can watch their "tells".

Image made at Atom Smasher

Oddsmakers need information to work with, and there's math involved, of course. Many details need to be considered. For something to evolve, there needs to be something to evolve from. When it comes to the origin of life, the information is getting bleaker all the time. It comes down to the cells, and even further, to the genome. The minimum number of cells for an organism to survive needs to be known, which involves sequencing genomes, gene expression, and several other items. It's a losing gamble to even consider that chemical evolution is possible. The smart money is on the certainty that God created life, and he made it for his purposes.

Las Vegas, the lottery, and the origin of life. What do these three things have in common? The house wins. Las Vegas casinos have the odds stacked against you. Many people buy a lottery ticket, but most never win the jackpot (and those that do usually file bankruptcy). The origin of life is so unlikely that every evolutionist ought to consider gambling at the casinos and playing the lottery on a regular basis because those odds are significantly better than a random chance process. Instead of 52 cards or 6 numbers in sequence, the origin of life requires over 100 genes to work. The odds of this happening were recently heralded with the synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome.

Evolution Is Stranger Than Fiction
When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species, no one knew what the unit of inheritance was. Ironically, genetics, the science that studies inheritance, was founded at approximately the same time that Darwin published his book. Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk interested in how different traits were passed on from generation to generation.1 With additional scientific advancements since Darwin, our views of inheritance and cells have radically changed. Today’s view of inheritance is based on the genes of an organism, also called its genome. Genome information exploded over the past five years with next-generation sequencing technology. But information doesn’t speak for itself. All scientists are human beings, and we all have a bias that we need to admit. I’m a biblical creationist, but let’s examine what the evolutionist says.

To read the rest, click on "Las Vegas, the Lottery, and the Origin of Life — How Many Genes Are Required to Make a Single-Celled Organism?"