Carbon, Cells, and the Origin of Life

Even Rusty Swingset, the ramrod at the Darwin Ranch (up yonder near Deception Pass), is a mite embarrassed at the goings-on in the cellar of the main house. They know full well that the origin of life is impossible through their machinations, but those jaspers keep on a-trying.

Micro-algae cells credit: CSIRO (CC BY 3.0)

"But Cowboy Bob, the origin of life has nothing to do with evolution!"

That's an old lie that gets repeated by village atheists, but apparently knowledgeable evolutionists didn't get the telegram.

As far as the origin of life (chemical evolution) is concerned, the lack of logic and scientific thinking are profound. Even back with the failed Miller-Urey experiment where an apparatus was based on assumptions concocted a means to conjure up some amino acids, Darwinists have believed that life could be formed by time, chance, and random processes. In the first place, that experiment did not produce anything useful. Second, it was intelligently designed equipment. See how this works — or doesn't work? That's not science, old son.

A more recent experiment involved several versions of a microfluidic reactor (the previous versions didn't work, mayhaps they forgot to plug in the flux capacitor) to hornswoggle carbon atoms into making formic acid. After all, we're carbon-based life forms. They got it to work.

So what?

I'm going to repeat something I used before:

A group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. They elected one scientist to go and tell God that he was now irrelevant.

The scientist walked up to God the Son and said, “God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We’re can clone people and do many other things that seem miraculous, so why don’t you just go on and leave us alone?”

God listened patiently and then said, “All right, how about if we have a man-making contest?”

The scientist said, “Okay, we can do that!”

“But,” God added, “we’re going to do this just like I did when I made Adam.”

The scientist said, “You got it”, and bent down and grabbed a handful of dirt.

Jesus (Col. 1:16) looked at him and said, “Not so fast. Go get your own dirt.”

These well-heeled researchers showed that they were able to get their result through intelligently-designed equipment. Those atoms are a far cry from life! The ingredients of a cell, all the way down to the DNA, are lacking all of the mechanisms necessary for life. They need the planning and power of the Master Engineer.

Today’s secular mindset replaces “In the beginning God…” with “In the beginning, hydrogen….” The extreme specificity of life’s chemical building blocks—let alone the innumerable, precise ways those chemicals combine to form living cells—demands a divine engineer. What natural processes ever generate even the most basic chemicals that go into living cells? Unfazed by such facts, origin-of-life-by-chance research persists. Experimental arrangements recently offered from this branch of research unwittingly reaffirm the need for a Creator to explain the origin of life.

As one of the many first steps on an imaginary road from chemicals to a living, reproducing cell, meandering carbon has to get prepped for more chemical reactions. Carbon needs to react with other chemicals on its supposed path to becoming sugars, proteins, RNAs, and lipids. Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), an international team of scientists used NASA funding to show that their specialized device can chemically prepare the carbon atom in CO₂ to form formic acid (HCOOH) at room temperature. Though spun as a win for origin-of-life-without-God concepts, the experimental setup says otherwise.

To read the rest of the article and how secularists are promoting science fiction, see "Getting Carbon into the First Cell".