Origin by Dr. Abidan Shah

ORIGIN by Dr. Shah, Clearview Church, Henderson, NC

Introduction: In 1818, British novelist Mary Shelley wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein. The story is about a young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who creates this creature to have some fame and accomplishment to his name. In the process he creates this hideous monster. The iconic scene that many of us have seen comes from the 1931 movie where the scientist shouts “It’s alive.” Unfortunately, people have been trying to do that for real – create life out of non-living matter. In our series on apologetics, we come to the section in Genesis where God created life on the fifth day. A couple of the questions that came through our questionnaire were about the origin of life: Where does life come from? What about the Miller-Urey experiment? What is abiogenesis? Main point: The origin of life has both fascinated and baffled scientists and researchers for a long time. They keep trying to find an alternative to God and they keep running into dead ends. But there is something far more fascinating and baffling than physical life. It is spiritual life. It is the supernatural work of God in the life of a person that changes them from a sinner to a child of God.

Genesis 1:20 Then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.”

Context: We now come to the fifth day of creation. This was a very important point in God’s creation week because it was the start of his “second act of true creation” (Henry Morris). The first act was on Day one when God made the contents of the universe and then worked on the elements to create space, light, water, land, plants, and the celestial bodies. The second act was on Day five when God made conscious life. The Hebrew phrase is “nephesh hayyah” meaning “living soul.” Unlike plants that have no soul, this was the beginning of creatures that have consciousness, meaning breath and will. These include the sea creatures and birds that fly over the earth on the fifth day, and cattle, creeping thing, beast of the earth, and human beings on the sixth day. Just like on Day one, God brought matter into being by direct command, on Day five, God brought life into being also by direct command. These 2 junctures are extremely puzzling to scientists and researchers – how did this world come into being out of nothing and how did life come into being in a non-living world. We’ve already answered the first question of creation ex-nihilo. In this message, we will focus on the second question of biogenesis.

Secular scientists and researchers claim that life began from non-living matter through natural processes. This is known as abiogenesis. The source of this thinking goes all the way back to Charles Darwin who wrote a book in 1859 titled On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle of Life. The goal of the book was to show the origin of all life from a common ancestor. Although Darwin did not talk about the origin of life in the book, he did suggest that life may have begun “in some warm little pond.” Even though in the same year, a French scientist named Louis Pasteur had disproved the idea of “spontaneous generation,” the idea that insects and flies could just come from decaying meats and other matter. Even before him some scientists had already shown that the worms and maggots come from eggs laid in the decaying matter by other worms and flies. Later, in 1924, a Russian biochemist named Alexander Oparin suggested that a series of reactions may have caused a cell to come together from some simple chemicals. This is where the idea came of a “primordial soup” – some body of water that was rich in organic compounds (Paul Garner). It was not until 1950 when Prof. Harold Urey was lecturing at the University of Chicago on the origin of the solar system that he suggested “it would be interesting to see what would happen if someone experimentally mimicked the earth’s atmosphere and passed energy through it” (Bradley and Thaxton). Sitting in his class was a 22-year-old student named Stanley Miller who was intrigued by this suggestion and took upon himself to make it happen. So, in 1953, he took a flask of hot water (oceans) which he connected to a flask of gases (atmosphere). He filled the flask with gases he believed were present in the atmosphere of the early earth (hydrogen, methane, and ammonia). Then, using electrodes, he sent sparks to replicate lightning. Next, he started boiling the water in the flask. The water evaporated and went through the flask with the gases that were being shot with electric currents. Within a few days, he noticed a reddish goo in the water and the glass. This was amino acids, which were the building blocks of protein. This is what they believed was the simple stuff that life was made of. This experiment became a part of the textbooks as the basic step towards how life came to be. In reality, there were many problems with it. As Paul Harvey would say, “Here’s the rest of the story.” Even in the 1960s, geochemists had serious doubts that the conditions created by Miller were actually how the atmosphere of the earth was in the early period before life began. In fact, there were several problems with it:

• Miller-Urey removed oxygen from the atmosphere because oxygen destroys amino acid bonds. It is a poisonous gas that oxidizes organic and inorganic substances. Scientists, even secular ones, now believe that there was oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere in the early stages. “If there was oxygen, life could not start. If there was no oxygen, life could not start” (Mike Riddle).
• Methane-Ammonia were not a major part of the atmosphere. Hydrogen escapes into outer space because it cannot be held by earth’s gravity. This would have left nothing to reduce carbon dioxide and nitrogen. As a result, methane and ammonia would have broken down.
• The Energy required in the experiment, which was provided by the electrodes, can create complex molecules but also destroy developing molecules.
• Amino acids are left-handed and right-handed (Chiral). Only left-handed make the proteins in living beings. The experiment produced both which is detrimental to life.

Since land does not work, some try water, but this would cause hydrolysis (water splitting) to destroy the amino acids. Then, there is life from outer space (panspermia) that we disproved last week.

Much Bigger Question: How do these proteins become a large molecule and then a simple living cell with incredible amount of information? Proteins are important for biochemical functions, but they require DNA. But DNA itself requires a complete set of very complex protein to make copies of itself (Jonathan Wells):

• Back in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix molecule that carries genetic information. DNA is like a winding staircase with the chains of nucleotides and the steps made of pairs of molecules called “bases.” There are 4 – Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Cytosine (C), and Guanine (G). The 3-letter combination of these (CGT, AAA, TCC) makes up one amino acid, which is the genetic code.
• The DNA can be understood in the following order – a little chunk of DNA would make a Gene (paragraphs). These Genes give instructions on how to make the protein.The DNA strands are known as Chromosomes (chapters). There are 46, 23 from father and 23 from mother. An organisms complete set of DNAs is the Genome (manual). It is the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes in a human being (Falk). The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003. This will be extremely helpful in diagnosing and treating illnesses in the near future.
• According to Michael Denton, the information needed to build the proteins for all species of organisms that have ever lived is about one thousand million. This information can fit on a teaspoon and have enough room left over to fit all the information in every book ever written. Someone else put it this way – the information in the DNA is so compact that “one square inch of DNA could encode the information in over seven billion Bibles.” Scientists are blown away by the 9 feet of DNA that is tightly coiled in every one of our body’s one hundred trillion cells. Its width is about 1/1000^th of the human hair.
• Each of the 30,000 genes inside our 23 pairs of chromosomes can give up to 20,500 different kinds of proteins.

The experiment to find the origin of life is trying to create amino acids. About 100 of the left-handed amino acids may create a protein. This is not even close to making a living cell. According to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, “There are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10²⁰)²⁰⁰⁰= 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.”

Since DNA doesn’t work, they turn to RNA. Again, it also requires living cells.

Jump forward to 2010, Craig Venter (biotechnologist and businessman) claimed to have created “the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” They called it “Synthia.” Again, it is taking an existing bacterium instead creating from scratch!

The only answer the secular scientist has is “We just need time…”

Listen to what David says in Psalm 139      13 “For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. 14 I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.”

Louis Pasteur said, “Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.”

The question is not “What” is the origin of life but “Who” is the origin of life. Although the New Testament talks a lot about life, it the apostle John who writes the most about it in his Gospel and his letter. The noun “zoe” is found about 135 times and the verb “zen” is found about 140 times.

1. Jesus is the Source of Creation Life.

 John 1      3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men…

2. Jesus is the Source of Eternal Life.

John 5:26 For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself,

John 6:35 And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst…57 As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me.

John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

3. The Evidence of Eternal Life

John 5:24 Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.

John 11:25   Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. 26 And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

John 17:3 “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”

4. The Requirement for Eternal Life

John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

1 John 5     11 And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. 12 He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. 13 These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God.

Invitation: Do you believe that God is the source of life? Do you believe that all life has come through Jesus Christ? Do you have eternal life through him? Are you saved?