Intelligent Design by Humans

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Excerpt Most scientists bristle at the idea that the extremely complex compounds and chemicals that led to the first life were put together by intelligent design. Only a theory involving pure chance will even be considered... Continue reading

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Most scientists bristle at the idea that the extremely complex compounds and chemicals that led to the first life were put together by intelligent design. Only a theory involving pure chance will even be considered. However, the notion that the building blocks of life needed to be formed not by blind accident but by the intentional manipulations of an outside, intelligent entity is gathering steam.

At one time, the vast, overwhelming majority of scientists wrongly believed in spontaneous generation — that life could spring suddenly from non-life. The Bible, on the other hand, makes it clear that a living being only appears “after its kind,” and never from non-life. We now know that the Bible was right and almost every scientist was wrong. As the journal Science News, mentioning some of the false theories held by earlier scientists, observed:

Maggots don’t arise spontaneously out of dead, rotting meat. Aphids never materialize within drops of morning dew. Aristotle and others who believed in the spontaneous generation of life were dead wrong (Barry 2008: 27).

Instead of springing spontaneously from non-life, all life must have had an intelligence guiding and controlling its formation. Intelligent designers in the laboratory are currently trying to do just that: guide and control the creation of life from non-life, as Science News reported:

Scientists are on the verge of creating living cells by piecing together small molecules that are themselves not alive. The result would be the world’s first human-made life forms, synthetic cells made more or less from scratch. (Ibid.).

Some scientists, such as John Glass of the J. Craig Venter Institute, are trying to “whittle down” the genome of a bacterium to its barest essentials and then synthesize that minimal genome. Other scientists are planning to assemble various molecules and genes to make a whole cell, not just a genome. Still others “hope to assemble a cell from more-primitive molecules that better mimic the molecules probably involved in the origin of life. If successful, these scientists may uncover clues about how the original ‘spontaneous generation’ of life occurred billions of years ago” (Ibid.).

These scientists have encountered problems in their endeavor, however. Glass’s cell, called Synthia, would consist of a manmade genome, but with a natural membrane enclosing it. “Essentially,” noted Glass, “we are commandeering the shell of a [pre-existing] cell” (Ibid. 28). Another scientist, Albert Libchaber of Rockefeller University, successfully created a protein system that produced fat, but he had to use an extract from an existing bacterium, “essentially borrowing the entire system from a living organism without knowing fully what it consisted of or how it worked” (Ibid.).

These problems demonstrate the difficulty in creating life from non-life, which in turn argues for the impossibility of such immeasurably complex life forms ever having come into existence by pure chance. As Giovanni Murtas of the Enrico Fermi Research Centre observed, “Using [modern] biological molecules, I find it hard to believe that an early simple cell…can ever have existed with only 30 to 40 genes” (Ibid.).

After quoting Murtas, the Science News article asked rhetorically: “But how could it be possible for the first cells to have already evolved more than 40 working genes?” (Ibid. 29). This is the entire point: If intelligent human designers can’t create life from non-life without using pre-existing life forms, then how could Earth’s original life forms have formed by themselves, without external creation or guidance?


Two hundred years ago, the vast, overwhelming majority of scientists believed, contrary to the Bible, in spontaneous generation. Today, the vast, overwhelming majority of scientists continue to believe (again in contradiction to the Bible) in an alternate form of spontaneous generation: that the first life sprang from non-life. They were wrong back then, and the Bible was right. It appears that the situation has not changed.

Reference:

Barry, P. 2008. “Life from Scratch.” Science News 173, no. 2.

Stephen Caesar holds his master’s degree in anthropology/archaeology from Harvard.

Recommended Resources for Further Study

     
The Myth of
Natural Origins
Paradise to Prison The Genesis Record

Comments Comment RSS

9/10/2008 10:23 AM #

"all life must have had an intelligence guiding and controlling its formation."

Translation: It was magic.

Grow up mister. Your invisible magician was not required for anything.

bobxxxx - 9/10/2008 10:23:13 AM

9/18/2008 6:54 AM #

Hey, Bob,

Do the math. According to the late Sir Fred Hoyle, the odds of a single cell arising spontaneously are 10 to the 43,000th power. Since the calculated number of atoms in the universe is only 10 to the 80th power, Sir Fred says, "“The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”

Since the odds of a monkey typing just 20 letters from one of Shakespeare's sonnets is 1 in 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 and since evolutionists claim the age of the universe to be 12.5 billion years or 394,470,000,000,000,000 seconds, that means it would take 50,518,794,573 monkeys typing every second since the foundation of the universe just to get "butwhereforedonotyou."

How does that "magician" look now?

Tim Sullivan - 9/18/2008 6:54:51 AM

9/18/2008 7:36 AM #

correction to my comment above: it should read "Evolutionists have more faith in the 'unobserved' than most Christians."  CM  

Charles McCoy - 9/18/2008 7:36:45 AM

9/18/2008 7:47 AM #

Bob needs to do more reading - the materialistic evolutionary view of life's origin requires a belief in "miracles."    Stephen Jay Gould recounted how one of his teachers, George Wald, explained the naturalistic explanation for the origin of life as being improbable at every step, but if you bathe the notion in enough time, then "the impossible becomes possible, the possible becomes probable, and the probable virtually certain.  One has only to wait, time itself performs the miracles."  (Gould, "An Early Start," Natural History - Feb. 1978, p. 10).  The documentation for life arising from non-life by this mythical unguided naturalistic scheme is what is invisible - it has never been observed or reproduced under lab conditions.  Evolutionists have more "faith" (assurance and conviction - Hebrews 11:1) in the observed than most Christians.  Since life appears to only come from pre-existing life, considering an intelligent and living source for life on earth is very reasonable.

Charles McCoy - 9/18/2008 7:47:58 AM

9/28/2008 1:08 PM #

Bob, (though I doubt you will return here to read this)
If we are being honest, how is our 'invisible magician' any more "logical" than matter sprouting from nothing, or any of the several notions for the origin of the universe?

Val Volume - 9/28/2008 1:08:28 PM

9/30/2008 12:28 AM #

Dear Mr. Bob,

Normally, we do not dignify such ignorance by even responding to it, but in this case I thought it was appropriate to state it very simply:

The only "magic" is the fairy tale for adults: EVOLUTION!! God is no magician, and he takes your blasphemy very seriously. You should turn from it now and trust in Him without further ado.

Henry Smith

hsmith - 9/30/2008 12:28:29 AM

10/21/2009 3:38 AM #

A tremendous amount of energy, intellect, and careful design has gone into the quest to produce life in the laboratory. The project has certainly not been left to chance events. If the darwinian scientists ever suceed they will only prove that an Intelligent Designer was essential. I doubt that many would notice the sublime irony in the result.  Jim Randolph

Jim Randolph - 10/21/2009 3:38:14 AM

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