Walter Sivertsen
Continued from Part 1
“And God said let the earth bring forth the living creatures after his kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after his kind…” (Genesis 1:24).
The phrases “after his kind” and “after their kind” occur ten times in Genesis chapter one. The strong emphasis in creation week on bringing forth life established the Law of Biogenesis. That law can be summarized as “life comes only from life.” It precludes the spontaneous generation of life, and the vast variety of living creatures declare the glory of God.
In spite of this assurance from God’s word, people long ago still believed in the spontaneous generation of life. So it took the scientific experiments by Francisco Redi (1660s), Lorenzo Spalanzani (1760s) and finally, Louis Pasteur (1860s) to falsify that old wives tale.
Pasteur and his predecessors dealt with the idea of the spontaneous generation of living organisms in an atmosphere with oxygen. When they established the Law of Biogenesis under those conditions, evolutionists shifted their focus to the spontaneous generation of molecules necessary for life in a mixture of gases without oxygen (i.e. a reducing atmosphere). The reason for excluding oxygen from the air is that it would react with many molecules and prevent the formation of the big molecules needed for life.
So, for more than six decades, scientists such as Dr. Stanley Miller have been using their intelligence to design experiments with reducing atmospheres in an attempt to create the molecules needed for life in the laboratory. The goal was to deny God’s glory by showing that God wasn’t necessary to get life started. Supposedly natural processes could do it by random reactions.
So far the results indicate that human intelligence and bio-engineering expertise are not capable of copying what the natural processes supposedly did by chance. Yet, a great deal of time and money are still spent each year at the origin of life laboratories on the east and west coasts of the United States.
The specific goal is to create the precursors of life by natural processes. Even though much human intelligence and bio-engineering are employed in designing these experiments, the experiments have been and continue to be colossal failures.
Suppose an experiment should one day be successful?…
and scientists produce and organize biomolecules so that a new life form takes shape. What would it mean?
It would emphatically show that the notion of evolution, which absolutely excludes both intelligence and design in its mindless, undirected and purposeless process, is false. Since both intelligence and design are key factors used by the scientists to design experiments, they would have accounted for the success.
Thus, running origin of life experiments is an illogical, self-refuting quest because both failure and success disprove evolution. Scientists who still pursue the quest suppress the truth (Romans 1:18-22) and deny God’s glory in biology.
Theoretically, a well-designed experiment could simulate a non-designed environment and set of conditions. We don’t need to set up a “heads we win, tails you lose” argument. However, in the unlikely event of life being produced “from scratch” in the lab, we wouldn’t need to roll over and give up! It might very well be that the experiment actually did depend on purposeful design elements, goal-oriented steps, or some other aspect not found in inanimate natural forces, conditions, and processes. Even if no such “cheating” was involved, the natural conditions might never have been able to exist on Earth. If they could have, they still might not have actually have existed. Finally, even if it were possible that some set of conditions that once occurred on Earth might have produced life, that doesn’t mean that life arose that way. Remember, early creationists believed in spontaneous generation under current conditions, but they were still faithful in accepting that the very first life on Earth was created by God, as the Bible tells us.