A simple challenge for atheists

[bob96]

Ah - abiogenesis. A different matter entirely, and he's right. It couldn't have happened randomly. And those are older books, written before the more recent work on abiogenesis.

Chemical biologists today believe that they have a fairly accurate model of the chemical makeup of the primordial Earth. And upon studying that model, they state that, given the attractive and combinant properties of the chemicals in the mixture, life would have almost no chance of not forming. In other words, when you have a specific set of planetary circumstances - energy from the sun, atmosphere, liquid water, and the chemical soup that should be found on every earthlike planet in the "Goldilocks Zone" - those chemicals will assemble themselves into primitive self-replicating molecules.

Just as certain conditions produce crystals, or gas giants, or methane snowstorms, so certain conditions produce life. It's not chance, any more than two magnets attract each-other by "chance."

It's sounds like you think scientists have already created life in a test tube!
Show me a reference to a scientist creating a self-replicating molecule. You can't.

From Quanta Magazine:
Gerald Joyce was able to build RNA out of right-handed building blocks, as others had done before him. But when he added in left-handed molecules, mimicking the conditions on the early Earth, everything came to a halt. “Our paper said if you have [both] forms in the same place at the same time, you can’t even get started,” Joyce said.

Jack Szostak, a biochemist at Harvard University and one of Joyce’s collaborators, is excited by the findings, particularly because the ribozyme is so much more flexible than earlier versions. But, he said, “I am skeptical that life began in this way.” Szostak argues that this scenario would require both left-handed and right-handed RNA enzymes to have emerged at the same time and in the same place, which would be highly unlikely.


The necessary building blocks of life can self assemble in the laboratory, but only under the strict experimental conditions designed by the scientist. This just shows that it takes an intelligent designer to create life.