Walter Sivertsen
How could life evolve if there is no way it could have started?
It seems logical that there would be no evolution if there were no life available to evolve. Some evolutionists must sense the weight of this problem because they have established numerous Origin of Life projects around the world. Here are just a few:
- In Japan the government has allotted the equivalent of one hundred million dollars to establish the Earth Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and they are recruiting dozens of researchers to address the issue of the origin of life.
- In Europe the European Union has funded a project to recruit 18 postdoctoral fellows to solve the mystery of life’s origin.
- Also, the Dutch have an initiative reported at www.origins-center.nl, and
- the Germans have created a Collaborative Research Center for the Origin of Life at the Max Planck Institute.
The United States is not to be left out. From coast to coast there are projects manned by geoscientists and bioscientists from several scientific disciplines, seeking to solve the mystery of life’s origin.
- In La Jolla, California there is the Scripts Research Institute,
- and at the University of California in Los Angeles, there is the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life.
- Also there is a co-operative effort between UCLA Riverside
- and the Rensselier Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. RPI has received a nine million dollar grant to fund the endeavor.
- Then there is the new NASA Consortium to study how life began. The purpose is to study prebiotic chemistry and early earth environments (evidently without having any samples for study).
- The list continues with the Baum Lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
- and the Origins Institute at the University of Akron (UAOI) in Ohio,
- plus the Institute for the Science of Origins at Case Western Reserve University.
- Florida has its efforts, too. The Evolution Institute, a not-for-profit organization in Florida, is also trying to solve the mystery.
When do the researchers expect success? Nita Sahai from UAOI has speculated that it will take 100 years. That will provide job security for a lot of people, but it sounds like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy and her friends, “Come back tomorrow.” He told them that because he didn’t have a clue as to how to grant their requests.
Sound familiar?
Finally, why is so much time, effort and hundreds of millions of dollars being used to address this mystery? Simply put, everyone realizes that if there is no way life can generate spontaneously, evolution is impossible, because there would be no life to evolve. If evolution is impossible, then the philosophy of naturalism, the foundational notion of current education, is false. That would result in the collapse of the ideological underpinning of the prevalent worldview in academia. The emotional pain of such an outcome is more than many folks can bear.
