One million dollars to prove life could arise without God

A $1 million prize is being offered to anyone who can scientifically show how life began.

If that strikes you as odd, it’s because we are so used to scientists claiming that evolution explains everything about nature.

But this prize money is proof positive that no one has yet been able to explain the origin of life.

If you cast your mind back to your biology lessons in school, you might remember being taught that life arose spontaneously in a chemical soup. It all sounded so convincing when you were 11 years old, didn’t it? But the truth is that that idea has never been proved, it was just a theory.

Self-writing instructions?

The Origin-of-Life Foundation (OLF), an international science-and-education organisation, is offering a million dollar prize through the Gene Emergence Project (GEP). The GEP aims to discover the origin of the genetic instructions in DNA. However, biologist Professor Jack Trevors, a member of GEP, emphasises the size of the task: ‘Genetic instructions don’t write themselves any more than a software programme writes itself.’¹

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has described DNA as far more complex than anything his software designers could ever come up with.

At least Trevors and Gates are honest enough to admit the problem. Atheists like Professor Richard Dawkins claim that there is no need to invoke a Designer to explain how a complex code got written into our DNA. But their alternative ideas simply aren’t credible. Hence the need for this prize.

Must be highly plausible

But I suspect that no one is going to become a millionaire. The money is only going to be awarded to someone who can prove that life arose without a Creator. The OLF website² states: ‘The Origin-of-Life Prize ¨ will be awarded for proposing a highly plausible mechanism for the spontaneous rise of genetic instructions in nature sufficient to give rise to life… by natural processes.’

The website goes on to list many reasons why the creation of life from non-living chemicals (abiogenesis) seems to be impossible, and makes it clear that evolutionary processes can’t help. Evolution, if you believe in it at all, can only work once life, and the ability to reproduce life, has already been established. That’s why Darwin called his book On the Origin of Species — not ‘On the Origin of Life’.

It’s good to see a group of evolutionists publicly admitting what creationists and Intelligent Design theorists have been saying for years: that despite the evolutionary origin of life being taught as fact, there is no credible theory of how it happened.

Life from outer space?

Clutching at straws, some scientists have accepted the idea of ‘panspermia’ — the theory that life was seeded on this planet from outer space, possibly by a meteorite. But that doesn’t solve the problem of how life began — it just pushes it out into space. Not only that, the likelihood of life surviving the ravages of space travel on a lump of rock is even less probable than it arising on a planet that is uniquely designed to support life.

But it is in the instructions for life itself that we get the biggest clue to life’s origin. DNA is an amazing store of information, and you don’t get information without intelligence. The late Dr. Werner Gitt, a creationist and information specialist, wrote that: ‘There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.’³

Leading science writer Professor Paul Davies agrees: ‘Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organised themselves into the first living cell… How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software?’⁴

Chance of life

Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle once calculated the chances of life originating by itself. He concluded that the probability of a hypothetical minimum self-reproducing cell forming by natural processes — consisting of only 400 enzymes and proteins (a real world bacterium has about 2,000) — was 1 in 10^40,000.⁵

Statistically, this means zero chance of succeeding. To give you an idea of how big a number 10^40,000 is, there are only about 10⁸⁰ atomic particles in the entire universe! It was this kind of problem that led Hoyle to come up with panspermia.

And by the way, there won’t be any point in Richard Dawkins entering for the prize. The OLF must have seen the fallacy of his computer modelling theories. Their website states that for any proposed mechanism to win it must have an ‘empirical correlation to the real world of biochemistry and molecular biology — not just mathematical or computer models’. That rules out Dawkins’s computer programme in his famous book, The Blind Watchmaker, that he hailed as evidence that evolution is possible.

Why? Because, as he himself admits, he has to use artificial selection to guide the process, not natural selection. His computerised simulation of evolution generates artificial creatures called Biomorphs, but ‘his creatures are tightly constrained by his Biomorph software and completely dependent on the computer’s operating software. Deleterious mutations are not possible [yet in the real world, the vast majority of mutations are deleterious]… He achieves the “evolution” by adjusting only a few variables within narrow ranges. So the only changes that occur in the creatures are those whose potential is already available in the programme originally.’⁶

Effectively, all Dawkins does is replace the Designer of life with himself as designer.

Hallmarks of design

Scientific research of the last few decades has resulted in more and more scientists admitting that life bears all the hallmarks of design. And it is this same evidence that has led atheism’s top philosopher, Professor Anthony Flew, to believe in God.
Those who claim science as their reason for doubting God really should take a better look at science.

References
1. Vowles, A., The Tree of Life, The Portico, Summer 2007, pp. 20-23. Published by Communications and Public Affairs (U of G) Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1.
2. http://www.lifeorigin.org
3. Gitt, W., In the Beginning Was Information, CLV, Bielefeld, Germany, pp. 64-67, 79, 107, 1997.
4. Davies, P., New Scientist 179:32, 12 July, 2003 and Life Force, New Scientist 163:27-30, September 18 1999.
5. Quoted at http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4202
6. Klyce, Brig, Computer Models of Evolution, http://www.panspermia.org/computrs.htm

Andrew Halloway is a freelance editor, writer and publishing consultant. He is also editor of Good News, a national monthly evangelistic newspaper. Email a.halloway@ntlworld.com or tel. 0115 9233 424.