What Origin of Life Research Really Tells Us

The Great Cover Up 

Here is an experiment you can try next time you clean out your refrigerator. When you excavate that old jar from way in the back of your refrigerator which long ago held something edible but is now covered with growths of various colors, scrape off some of that growth and put it into a pot of boiling water. After boiling for several minutes let the water cool off and then pour the water into a little pond that has no living organisms and mimics the conditions of the early Earth. Do you think that those organic chemicals from the refrigerator will eventually reassemble and produce new living cells? Evolutionists do. In fact it’s worse. Evolutionists believe life will spontaneously appear even without the benefit of adding that full complement of boiled over organic ingredients. In order to understand fully the extent to which evolution abuses science one must understand two things: what the science really says and what evolutionists really say.

There is no scientific demonstration that life spontaneously arises from non life. Furthermore, the science doesn’t even indicate that such a thing occurs, even if it hasn’t been actually demonstrated. In fact, after almost a century of research, what the science reveals is that there are significant problems with the idea.

A partisan assessment from an evolution opponent? Not at all. I would be delighted to discover that life can spring up spontaneously. How fascinating that would be. But that simply is not what science has told us, like it or not. There does not exist a single study or experiment even coming close to showing how this could happen. This is not a partisan assessment, it is simply a scientific fact. That is what the science really says.

Now for what evolutionists really say. What many people are unaware of is that evolutionists take a position completely contrary to the science. I do not mean that evolutionists are hoping to reverse the scientific findings. I mean they are contradicting the scientific findings. Evolutionists literally make bold, unequivocal claims that the spontaneous origin of life from non life is a known scientific fact.

It may seem astonishing to those unfamiliar with evolutionary thought. But this blatant lie is typical of how evolutionists misrepresent the science. For example, leading science writer Carl Zimmer wrote in his well-received book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea that scientists “have found compelling evidence that life could have evolved into a DNA-based microbe in a series of steps.”

Writers such as Zimmer do not contrive such claims, they come from the evolution researchers. As no less than the National Academy of Science declared. “For those who are studying the origin of life, the question is no longer whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving nonbiological components. The question instead has become which of many pathways might have been followed to produce the first cells”? [1]

Recently this high confidence was again evident in a peer-reviewed paper by David Penny and coworkers which begins:

There are some areas of science where there is still strong resistance to basic scientific conclusions: anthropogenic climate change, the reality of long term evolution, the origin of life, and the safety and efficacy of vaccination programs are well-known examples.

It would be difficult to imagine a greater misrepresentation of science. To be sure evolution is not a good scientific theory, but the real abuse of science is in evolution’s misrepresentation of science.

1. National Academy of Sciences, Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999) 6.