R&I – TXPAT ****
God made the world so wonderful
Then at the end, you see,
Before He’d rest He made the best,
For that’s when God made ME!
Excerpt from “God’s wonderful creation” By Elsie Palmer
Gen. 1:24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
In our universe, we have so many mysteries that have yet to be fully understood. One of those is why we have life on this planet. Most theists understand this is a direct creation from God whereas most atheists claim it was all by natural processes yet to be understood. Could it be due to chemical evolution? Or is there some other natural process? And with the increasing sightings of UFOs maybe life has been deposited by aliens with technologies far beyond our capabilities. Even when pushed in an interview Richard Dawkins at least once gave that is a possibility. I don’t doubt in the years to come that this will be proposed as a better explanation than for the existence of God. But then isn’t God an extraterrestrial, even an extra-dimensional being?
Let’s say for a second that there are space aliens from other planets that simply have the advanced intelligence and technology to produce life from the simple building blocks within the soil and oceans. The thing is they would be subject to the same laws of the universe that we are and so if it can be shown that that’s not a possibility then it would not be a possibility anywhere.
In this discussion, I am going to look at the evidence and then use the principle of the best explanation to try to answer this question. There were three of the many arguments that I could present, that I wanted to present in this OP. One of those is concerning right-handed amino acids, another is related to irreducible complexity and the last one I wanted to cover was in DNA. Due to the size already I’ve minimized the discussion on DNA.
Protein, essential for life.
The longest human protein is Titin with 34,350 amino acids. The smallest human protein is 44 amino acids but it could be an abortive translation from the 5′ UTR of another mRNA.
https://www.science20.com/princerain/blog/whats_biggest_and_whats_smallest
A mathematician at MIT figures the chances of a protein necessary for life to assemble by chance:
Chances of finding a functional protein by chance equal 1/10 to the 164th
10to the 80th elemental particles in the universe
10 to the 16th seconds since the Big Bang
10 to the 139th events since the beginning of the Big Bang
Why are the probabilities so high?
One reason is only Left-handed amino acids must be combined in the long protein chains necessary for life. One right-handed amino acid would prevent the protein from folding properly for life
On Earth, the characteristic of the amino acid of life are all “left-handed” in shape, and cannot be exchanged for their right-handed doppelgänger. Meanwhile, all sugars characteristic of life on Earth are “right-handed.” The opposite hands for both amino acids and sugars exist in the universe, but they just aren’t utilized by any known biological life form. (Some bacteria can convert right-handed amino acids into the left-handed version, but they can’t use the right-handed ones as is.) In other words, both sugars and amino acids on Earth are homochiral: one-handed.
The Miller–Urey experiment was praised as proof that life could present itself through natural means. The only problem with that is the research project, which was highly intelligently designed, produces equal amounts of right and left-handed amino acids as well as some tar which both are incompatible with life. This is one reason why Miller never repeated this experiment and he passed away 57 yrs. later, in 2007.
This is an example of how both scientists and the media misrepresent this type of research. Yet you read about this experiment in science books in school and you were given the impression that this showed how life could naturally self-assemble itself. Unfortunately, this was a gross misrepresentation as is virtually all news reports along this line.
No known mechanism in nature would prevent right-handed amino acids from joining the party of protein development i.e. it’s impossible to explain a natural process that could produce a life that is outside of some highly advanced intelligently designed process.
If we Google how long has life been on this planet we get 3.5 billion years ago.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/epo_web/impact_cratering/origin_of_life/index.html
Scientists estimate that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. So you have roughly 1 billion years for a process that seems impossible to happen to have happened and then evolved into a life that can be fossilized because the first fossil is 3.5 billion years old based on scientists’ estimations. It’s appropriate here to explain that every system of dating things is based on one or two unproven assertions. Scientists guesstimated it takes 10,000 years to develop a fossil.
There was no life on Earth for the first billion years because the atmosphere was not suitable for life. Earth’s first atmosphere had lots of water vapor but had almost no oxygen. Later, frequent volcanic eruptions put several different gases into the air
So the first 1 billion years, life is impossible because of the atmosphere yet we start the second billion years with fossils already. So it seems obvious we have a time factor let alone the probability factor that makes this scenario impossible. But you can always use circular reasoning to say we know it’s possible because we have a life now. But that would be an example of fallacious thinking. But then again, space aliens.
Now, another impossibility for life to have happened due to purely natural processes is the issue with irreducible complexity.
The Origin of Irreducibly Complex Molecular Machines
Irreducible complexity destroys Darwinism. Now for a lot of atheists, this seems like something easily dismissed because the impression is irreducible complexity has been fully dismissed by science. The famous court case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005) was to have put the nail in the coffin for irreducible complexity.
Probably one of the most amazing propulsion systems is one found in bacteria called a flagellum. This microscopic machine is driven by a motor with distinct mechanical parts it resembles a humanly designed rotary engine with a universal joint, bushings, a stator, rotor, and a driveshaft with its own clutch and braking system. In some bacteria, it is clocked at a hundred thousand rotations per minute and it is near 100% efficient plus it can change directions in a split second.
Now here are the interesting facts, the evolutionist had a biologist testify that this machine had evolved from another similar machine that looks somewhat similar yet had a completely different function. Kenneth Miller was the biologist that presented evidence against the concept that if you take parts away from the flagellum it would not be functional. He presented a machine called the type III secretion system that is missing 30 components of the flagellum yet it functions. But its function is completely different than the flagellum even though its structure looks similar.
What he didn’t do in his research was point out that if you start to add back those 30 missing protein components each of them would have absolutely no function and thus natural selection would have eliminated them before the other 30 could have theoretically been added to make a functional flagellum. But that’s not the only problem with his argument after the trial it was later found that the flagellum preceded the type III secretion system. In other words, it was found in nature before the type III secretion system. If that would have been known at the trial the argument would’ve disintegrated. Yet today most evolutionists think the type III secretion system destroyed the irreducible complexity argument that intelligent design puts forth.
It is interesting how these misrepresentations and falsehoods are components of Darwinism.
One of the scientists that presented testimony in this trial indicating that evolution could account for the development of the flagellum from the type III secretion system published in research a year later that science had no idea how that progression could happen under Darwinian mechanisms. (From the origin of species to the origin of bacterial flagella in nature reviews microbiology)
What was later proven was the flagellum appeared earlier than the type III secretion system.
The hypothesis that the flagellum evolved from the type three secretory systems has been challenged by recent phylogenetic research that strongly suggests the type three secretory systems evolved from the flagellum through a series of gene deletions.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3459982/
Thus the argument against irreducible complexity has crumbled. So many of the arguments for vertical evolution have similarly crumbled like the argument for junk DNA, vestigial organs, etc. this is truly a holy theory as it has so many holes all the credibility for it has leaked out.
DNA
The laws of the universe are necessary for life to exist. But they aren’t sufficient to explain how life arose. The origin of life requires a massive infusion of information, which can only be explained by intelligent design.
Considering the marvels of DNA, four-bit programming light years ahead of our best computer scientist (as said by Bill Gates who knows more about programming than any biologist), the most sophisticated information storage system known to man with our best technology we can’t duplicate, “DNA has an information-storage density several orders of magnitude higher than any other known storage technology,” says Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist of the Semiconductor Research Corporation, quoted in Wired, and inside the cell DNA control miniaturized machines with gears, etc. impossible for our current technology to reproduce, where in nature do we ever find blind forces with the ability to outstrip our best minds and technologies?
Information, coding, machinery are all products of a mind. Again when we consider irreducible complexity, the necessity for only right-handed amino acids in the complexity of DNA I contend that the best explanation is an intelligent designer.
When is a scientific theory, that’s been shown to be so full of holes and misrepresentations, going to be set aside?
John Keefe