Submitted by Terence Blackett
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth – Gen. 1:1
Who holds the “patent” on the things we see all around us in nature? How do we explain that it takes an estimated 100,000 different proteins to construct a human being? Is that the product of accident, chance or randomization – or does it spell Intelligent Design? For many, the origin of how life emerged remains one of the great unsolved mysteries and conundrums for both ancient and modern science.
It is recognized that the subject of this current piece is beyond the gamut of unlimited word count to do it any serious scholarship – however as this is a galvanizing issue and feelings run deep on both sides of the divide, we will attempt to do some form of interim justice given our lack of brevity. For although questions regarding the genesis of life remain a talking-point even within the realm of philosophy – religion (understandably) dominates this platform; yet science continues to hold its own in keeping the debate alive.
So how can concepts like ‘abiogenesis’, ‘exogenesis’, ‘quantum mechanics’ and ‘stellar nucleosynthesis’ assist us in making sense of our primordial quest for understanding?
Let us begin in 1870 where Thomas Huxley opined that “I shall call the…doctrine that living matter may be produced by not living matter, the hypothesis of abiogenesis…” This was a paleoanthropological echo from a not too distant past when Charles Darwin had chained himself to the Tower of Babel in defense that there was no GOD* and in turn hatched a lurid tales of spontaneous regeneration of biological organisms which metamorphosed over billions of years to eventual form all living things including man.
In 1924, Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin also proposed that living cells arose gradually from nonliving matter through a sequence of chemical reactions. This “Warm Soup” theory by evolutionary scientists suggest that according to Oparin, “gases present in the atmosphere of primitive earth, when induced by lightening or other sources of energy, would react to form simple organic compounds. These compounds would subsequently self-assemble into increasingly complex molecules such as proteins. These, in turn, would organize themselves into living cells.”
So abiogenesis – is that field of science dedicated to studying how life might have arisen for the first time on planet earth as some form of primordial protoplasmic globule – a basis that is challenged by the proponents of exogenesis; both concepts in one way or another debunked by quantum mechanics and stellar nucleosynthesis propping up the Big Bang theory and the evolution of life forms.
Huxley’s echo continues to reverberate even today as we witness the power of pseudo-indoctrination and its effects upon the human mind. “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves… For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” A. Huxley (evolutionist, leftist, and grandson of T.H. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s bulldog”): Ends and Means, p. 270.
Therefore, if abiogenesis posits this idea of life emerging from virtually nothing, it is clear to see why men fail to believe in the existential nature of a Creator GOD* and that as the Designer – He made all things according to His will and commands. Huxley, like many, have landed in a quagmire of meaningless; a soup-bowl of void and nothingness – to find themselves vacuous, empty and alone in the universe.
Let us now examine the theory of exogenesis or panspermia (mutually interchangeable terminologies with slight variants at times) as it is referred to in some circles. Exogenesis is a hypothesis that originated in the 19th century in opposition to the theory of spontaneous generation. The physics of the universe describes exogenesis as an alternative to earthly abiogenesis hypothesizing that “primitive life may have originally formed extraterrestrially, either in space or on a nearby planet such as Mars. Such ideas have had many eminent supporters over the years, including Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, and the astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle among others. These theories may go some way to explaining the presence of life on Earth so soon after the planet had cooled down, with apparently very little time for prebiotic evolution.”
But there’s a problem here!
If the “seeds” of life already existed somewhere in the universe or from some nearby or distant galaxy, and that life on earth may have originated through some form of scattered “star-dust” (symbolic of the same way a farmer scatters seed into the wind to sow crops) – then life on our planet was the indirect result of cosmic geoponics involving interdependent cross-colonization and cross-fertilization from nearby worlds. Therefore it would be safe to conclude that there is a reverse process as well – though no scientific proof exists anywhere.
At the molecular level, life as we know it requires the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, phosphorus and sulphur to exist at sufficient densities and temperatures for the chemical reactions between them to occur. These conditions however are not widespread in the universe, so this limits the distribution or scattering of life as an ongoing process damaging the environment for life, as it would be exposed to radiation, cosmic rays, stellar winds and other rogue cosmologies.
Clearly, exogenesis lacks creditability or validity barring a few who would choose to believe that life on earth was the direct result of extraterrestrial phenomena – something Hollywood is keen to exploit in order to engage weak, flaccid and debilitated minds who believe that the concept of a Creator is too simplistic a notion to be given any credence – which brings us to the least understood topic of quantum mechanics and how it can explain (if at all) the origins of life.
Bioastronomy and astrophysics have been in a race to build a quantum computer with the ability to process massive informational data resources inconceivable to the human mind – given the premise that life as defined by information processing and replicating systems could prove that the abovementioned theories of abiogenesis and exogenesis were merely random concoctions of a primordial chemical soup mix.
While some argue that quantum theory deals with the structure and behaviour of atoms and molecules and it really has absolutely nothing to do with the mythology of abiogenesis or exogenesis as a matter of fact – yet quantum mechanics does provide (in theory) the building blocks of biochemistry and therefore provides the relative forces including the coherence, entanglement and superposition constituents which allow non-living matter to make up living matter. The plausibility of this speculative assertion rests, however, on life somehow circumventing the decoherence effects of environmental phenomena.
To simplify – Paul Davies suggests for decoherence to be avoided: “In the presence of environmental noise, the delicate phase relationships that characterize quantum effects get scrambled, turning pure quantum states into mixtures and in effect marking a transition from quantum to classical behaviour. Only so long as decoherence can be kept at bay will explicitly quantum effects persist.” But based on this process of randomization – how plausible is it to keep the fluidity of environmental noise at bay? This is the conundrum!
So to posit with any degree of certainty that the effects of quantum mechanics will play a significant or decisive role in managing the proprietary blends of either abiogenesis or exogenesis would be the subject of an advanced research project.
However, to bring home the disparity that exist within quantum mechanics and the origins of life can be cited from theoretical physicist Paul Davies who argues that “the transition from non-life to life was a quantum-mediated process, and that the earliest form of life involved nontrivial quantum mechanical aspects.” However, J. D. Sinclair argues that based on the Copenhagen Interpretation that “the first question is the indeterminacy of matter while in an unobserved state. This indeterminacy seems to agree very well with a Hindu worldview. Hindus believe the world observed through our senses is an illusion, and the actual reality (the universe) is itself God. One can argue that indeterminacy proves that nature is an illusion after all. It also seems to show that there can be no reality outside the universe, hence God is the universe or there is no God.”
Davies believe that “the field of molecular biology posed interesting scenarios according to Schrodinger (1944) where the stable transmission of genetic information from generation to generation in discrete bits implied a quantum mechanical process, although he was unaware of the role of or the specifics of genetic encoding. But could quantum mechanics solve the issue of the living state of matter? Or did the quantum mechanical process play a key role in the emergence of life up to a predetermined level, and subsequently ceased to be a significant factor when life became fully emergent?”
These are the issues which science is still trying to answer!
The final aspect of our narrative termed stellar nucleosynthesis deals with this concept some call the “BIG BANG” where some proponents believe that many of the plagues which were experienced in the last millennia was due to this theory.
Science explains stellar nucleosynthesis as the collective term for the nuclear reactions taking place in stars to build the nuclei of the elements heavier than hydrogen. Small quantity of these reactions also occurs on the stellar surface under various circumstances. For the creation of elements during the explosion of a star, the term supernova nucleosynthesis is used. So for BIG-BANG* theorists like Chris Halsall this phenomenon is a crucial determinant in their orthodoxy to prove that this is how life originated.
A quantum leap back into the past to the year 1348 – Europe has fallen under the shadow of the Black Death. The Black Death sweeps through Europe between 1348 to 1353 and is thought to have killed one-third of London’s citizens. Many believe that this was the prophesied time of the [7] last plagues of Revelation 15:5, “as the plague decimates all in its path, fear and superstition are rife.”
These were the cinematographic portrayals and projections from the 2010 box office movie release aptly entitled “The Black Death”. Hollywood’s fascination with dark, sinister themes throws us back to a bygone era in time where myths, legends and folklore ruled the day. The Biblical idea of plagues as is termed in Revelation 8:10-11 where it says: “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter” is a prophecy of damnable proportions which cannot be easily deconstructed using scientific jargon.
But today, the objectification of that kind of medieval primordiality is coined in the words “conspiracy theory”, “doomsday prophecies” and neomythology – theories that tend to either excite, scare or irate most who are moved by them either in one way or another.
However, the line between Hollywood fiction and what is real has been so blurred and it is difficult to tell who is really writing the historical script – both past and present.
A recent study by a team of paleo-archeologists, osteologists and others from universities in Canada and Germany unearthed surviving fragments of DNA in bones and teeth of 2,400 victims of the Black Death who were buried at a special cemetery a few metres from the Tower of London, providing samples for a ground-breaking research study.
The research indicated that the yersina pestis microbe (the infectious agent) was not present on the British mainland prior the Black Death, which suggest it reached Britain from elsewhere. But how did it get here? What were its origins?
A Roman Catholic nun in Italy, Sister Mariaelena Bianchessi draws on theories presented by Dr. Fred Hoyle and Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe, both known for their belief that influenza outbreaks are caused by newly arriving viruses from outer space in a recently published a research paper. If this can be proved under vigorous examination – then it goes quite some distance in proving the inerrant accuracy of the Bible. The other aspects of this theory can be explored in greater details at publication.
Finally, in conclusion, we can wrap up our theoretical sketch by skimming the surface of the creationist debate to see how they juxtapose with the other theories.
In our world currently, many religious fundamentalists believe that the earth and everything on it was created a six [24] hour days, [6000] years ago while evolutionary scientists, atheists and others believe that a Creator GOD* is a myth and as Professor Hawking lamented earlier this year that “Heaven” ‘is a place reserved for people who are afraid of the dark’. Musketeers like Hawking, Dawkins & Co; believe the Bible is a book filled with mythology; life is the product of randomization; most importantly, life is the product of undirected events. What is lost in the argument is that theoretical scientists look at the designs in nature and copy products and technologies which have been very beneficial to mankind – however they fail miserably in answering with any intellectual honesty the question that says – “if the copy required a designer, what about the ORIGINAL?”
Evolutionary science hinges on [3] basic myths: Mutations provide the raw materials needed to create new species; Natural selection led to the creation of new species; and fossil records document macroevolutionary changes. However, like Christianity, to a lesser extent, belief in evolution requires a serious act of faith. But as evolutionist Richard Lewontin states, “Many scientist refuse even to consider the possibility of an intelligent Designer because we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.”
The blogmaster invites you to join the discussion.