God's Crime SceneSample

Could Life Emerge in the Universe Without God?

Whenever I enter a death scene, it’s my job to determine how the death occurred. As we examine the life scene of the universe, we have a similar objective. How did life emerge in our universe and on our planet? How did nonliving matter turn into living organisms?

If you read high school or undergraduate biology books, you might think these are easy questions to answer. But the truth is, in spite of decades of concerted research, scientists are no closer to knowing how life emerged today than they were generations ago, although they have exhausted a large number of possible leads. British chemist Leslie Orgel put it this way: “The problem of the origin of life on the earth has much in common with a well-constructed detective story.… There are far too many clues and far too many suspects. It would be hard to find two investigators who agree on even the broad outline of events.”

Researchers have been consistently unable to identify a viable location, pathway, or mechanism explaining the origin of life. With each passing year, the level of complexity and interaction at the cellular level becomes more apparent and more difficult to explain.

…Scientists want to know how these components emerged and also the chronology of events that led to their appearance. They have been careful to limit their explanations to the forces of physics and chemistry “inside the room” of the universe. The resulting internal search for a plausible chemical pathway has been more difficult than anyone imagined. Biologist and professor Gerald Rau wrote, “Thus the problem of getting all of the compounds together in a living cell is much like the problem of making a cream puff. The filling needs to be made in a pan on a stove, then put in a refrigerator, while the shell is combined in a bowl, baked in an oven, then cooled, before the two parts are put together.

All of the steps need to happen to the right amounts of the right components in the right sequence using the right tools in order to form a successful final product.” To make matters worse, the “icing” on each “cream puff” must also be inscribed with a message (DNA) billions of letters in length …our investigation of life in the universe will eventually come down to the presence of information in our life scene. Proteins, ribosomes, enzymes, and other cellular building blocks are formed at the direction of specific nucleotide sequencing in DNA. This nucleic sequence is informational.

…Our personal experience tells us information comes only from intelligent sources. This presents a problem for those who attempt to stay “in the room” of the universe to account for genetic information. If we limit ourselves to the materials available to us in the universe, information must be explained from matter, chance, the laws of chemistry or physics, and nothing more. Efforts to account for information in this way have failed repeatedly. In fact, the information in DNA proves to be the decisive stumbling block for every naturalistic theory offered for the origin of life.

…The chance arrangement of information in DNA is prohibitively improbable, and there are no chemical or physical laws at work to dictate its existence. We are left, then, with a paradox: the laws and forces of nature cannot produce information, but information is required for life to begin. Given the utter inability of chance or natural law, and our observations related to the origin of information, intelligence is the best explanation. But this requires us to look for an intelligent source transcending the limits of the physical universe.