Clough Evolution Lesson 10

Problems of the Evolutionary Hypothesis (2) Creation of Life

 

Now we come to discussing Chance as the mechanism, once the universe has been created, as the mechanism for moving from the nonliving to the living.  This involves the problem of the creation of life.  Not it is commonly argued, very vehemently, that Chance is sufficient to explain the rise of living material from nonliving material and it is this basic axiom of cosmic evolution today that we want to direct our attention to at this time. 

 

First, what is life?  Many people have given many different definitions to life; you pick up a book in bio-chemistry, pick up a book on biology and you see things like the need for metabolism, the need for reproduction, need for response to environment, characteristics of life.  And generally speaking, without going into the fine points of the discussion, generally speaking modern man thinks of the crucial boundary between the nonliving inorganic material, such as rock, soil, air, gas, the boundary between all that and living material, such as plants, algae, animals and so forth.  But it’s shocking when you begin to study the Scriptures that this is not where the Scripture draws the crucial line and I think this is important for Christians to realize in this whole controversy of the creation of life.  Just exactly what do the Scriptures mean by life?  It turns out, and this is an interesting discovery that I made several years ago, it turns out that the Scriptures when they talk of life are not drawing the boundary between living and nonliving.  Scriptures draw the boundary between plants and animals; that’s the boundary of life.  To the Scriptures, technically speaking, the word “living” or “living soul” does not refer to plants; it only refers to animals and man.  The Bible’s strong categorical boundary, therefore, is a boundary between the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom; not between the plant kingdom and physical mechanical creation. 

 

For example, if we turn to Genesis 1:20, the first time you encounter the word for life is in Genesis 1:20, “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth…” so forth and so on.  And I have shown elsewhere in our discussions on anthropology that the word “life” in Scripture is always used when you have the union of a spirit, or the immaterial, and material flesh.  In other words, plants would be defined as flesh; animals have spirit as well as flesh.  Some people doubt animals have spirits; Scripture clearly says that animals have spirit in Ecclesiastes 3:21.  [Who knows the spirit of man that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast that goes downward to the earth?]  So animals have spirit, and thus since animals have spirit in union with flesh, they are living souls.  And man has a spirit, of course much different from the spirit of animals in that man’s spirit is made in the image of God.  Evidently animals are not; animals are not capable of fellowship with God, they are not made in the image of God but nevertheless they are spiritual, they have a spirit.  This is why, for example, animals can be demon possessed, whereas plants cannot be. 

 

Notice now in Genesis 1:11, here is where the boundary is commonly drawn by modern man, the boundary between the living and the nonliving, the boundary between the plant kingdom and nonliving mechanical creation.  And yet in the creation narrative of Genesis 1:11 we have, “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass [vegetation], the Herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth; and it was so.”  If this doesn’t teach anything else it teaches us to be very cautious about claiming that when man has synthesized a protein molecule he therefore has created life.  He has not created life according to Scripture; only when man synthesizes a protein molecule, builds a protein molecule, but molecular structure called a body and is able to infuse into that body a spirit of some sort, then and only then has he created life in the Biblical sense of the word.  So Christians mustn’t be shoved into a corner by unbelievers trying to use Christian words with non-Christian meanings and getting all fouled up. 

 

The creation of life according to Scripture occurs the first time in Genesis 1:20, not Genesis 1:11, and thus man may very well synthesize protein molecules, but that act has only accomplished what was done by God in verse 11, namely that the earth brought forth grass, that out of the non-living inorganic material we brought into existence organic material from this inorganic material.  However, the important thing to notice is that this is not life.  This is not life, this is simply plants. 

 

Now before we discuss Chance and the particular issue of Chance and the role of the creation of life, so-called, we want to examine a little bit the religious drive that motivates men to cross the boundary between the nonliving and the living.  In other words, my point here is that it’s not just a simply passive scientific fancy that is behind the drive to synthesize protein molecules.  There’s a very basic religious and philosophical drive; man wants to be able to show that he doesn’t need a Creator; the Creator hypothesis is not necessary to explain the crossover from the nonliving to the living.  For an example, a very, very famous and a very, I think illustrative example of the religious drive that motivates many men to seek out and to search out this boundary between the living and the nonliving, and I’m indebted to a paper in the Creation Research Society quarterly, December, 1967, pages 1006-113 by a European geologist by the name of N. A. Rupke.  The title of the article is called The Monera Fallacy.  After reviewing the brief history of the idea of spontaneous generation, and this is basically what we’re facing here, either God was responsible for crossing the boundary between the living and the nonliving or it was crossed by Chance.  If it was crossed by Chance then we label this thing spontaneous generation.  So the issue under discussion is creation or spontaneous generation; that’s basically the point.

 

Now Darwin, in 1859, when he wrote Origin of Species, hinted but didn’t strongly push, but hinted at some forms of spontaneous generation.  However, Louis Pasteur, in 1860, between 1860 and 1866, notice this, it’s very interesting; Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation after Darwin had written Origin of Species.  Darwin wrote Origin of Species in 1859, but Pasteur didn’t perform his experiments until 1860-1866.  So it was after Darwin wrote Origin of Species that the doctrine of spontaneous generation of living forms from nonliving forms was disproved by Louis Pasteur. 

However, there were diehards in Pasteur’s time and there still are, for spontaneous generation is the only alternative to creation, so therefore philosophically it’s very hard to swallow Pasteur’s experiments that flies do not come from mud, that maggots do not come from meat.  Now this is a crude from, but nevertheless, it was the spontaneous generation was phrased in the 19th century.  Now this is very hard to take because if spontaneous generation is impossible then we must have special creation.  Now it’s interesting that in the last half of the 19th century two of the most prominent biologists in the world tried desperately to find something to disprove Pasteur.  They wanted to find, they looked all over the world to find some sort of half-living, half-nonliving forms.  These two biologists were respectively, first, Dr. Ernest Haeckel; Ernest Haeckel in 1868 suggested the existence of such form.  Haeckel suggested a sort of blob of protoplasm without the highly structured design of the cell, so you would have not a real living cell because there wasn’t any nucleus and there wasn’t any differentiation within it.  But nevertheless, it wasn’t really nonliving either because it was genuine protoplasm, and Haeckel suggested the existence of these forms.  And then Thomas Huxley, in 1868 claimed he found two evidences in mud samples drawn from the Atlantic Ocean.  One evidence of these half-living half-nonliving forms Huxley said were what were known as coccoliths, and the second was some certain blobs of protoplasm and we won’t go into the various names, I just want to show you that Huxley claimed to have found some mud samples taken from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, evidences for these half-living and half-nonliving forms that he and Haeckel insisted existed.  Now these two biologists had to say this because they desperately were trying to destroy the effect of Pasteur’s anti spontaneous generation experiment.  And so in order to neutralize Pasteur and to stop the threat to the philosophy of naturalism over and against creationism these men pushed these two forms.

 

However, in 1872, only four years later, it was found that Huxley’s blobs of protoplasm actually were mere sulfate of lime precipitate.  In other words, what Huxley had done was he had, it turns out, had dredged the samples from the ocean and then put them in strong alcohol, and the expedition in 1872 that tried to duplicate Huxley’s findings dredged the Atlantic, pulled up the samples and did not place them in alcohol and they couldn’t find any of these so-called blobs of protoplasm.  They only found various debris and so on of the ocean bottom but they didn’t find any of Huxley’s blobs.  Now it’s interesting that when they began to store the samples in alcohol that’s when they found them, and a chemist quickly analyzed the problem.  This was just sulfate of lime precipitates and so basically what Huxley was looking at, Huxley’s so-called blobs of protoplasm, were nothing more than precipitate caused by the alcohol storing the mud samples.  So this great thing that was paraded all over the world as evidence that Pasteur was wrong, Darwin and the spontaneous generation advocates were right, was simply a chemical precipitate. 

 

And then in 1902 a German biologist by the name of Hans Lohmann discovered Huxley’s coccoliths were mere fragments of dead floating flagellates that had settled to the bottom of the ocean.  In other words, they are organic, yes, but they are just discarded secretions from this algae like form that floats on top of the Atlantic ocean, and this form dies and the shell, etc. drops to the bottom of the ocean and it was this stuff that Huxley had mistakenly thought were his half-living half-nonliving matter. 

 

Now it’s interesting that this craving for halfway forms still persists and you can read, for example, in W. Seifriz book, Protoplasm, written in 1936, authors name is W. Seifriz’s, on page 11 Seifriz says, commenting on the fact that Haeckel and Huxley both failed in their attempts to find half-living, half-nonliving material says this, speaking particularly of Haeckel: “Though his find was not what he thought it to be, yet…[tape goes blank]…the conviction that life began in a relatively undifferentiated mass of protoplasm.”  Isn’t that an interesting statement; after these men had experimentally been proven wrong, still he says the philosophical idea is nevertheless sound, so we cannot escape “the conviction that life began in a relatively undifferentiated mass of protoplasm,” to which we would add that’s right if you avoid the doctrine of creation.  If you deny creation you have to say somehow there was such a thing as spontaneous generation.  This is exactly what we’ve been saying, and I think you couldn’t have a better admission but that Dr. Seifriz, in his book, Protoplasm, admits that this is a philosophical issue, this is not a scientific issue, it’s a philosophical issue.  And scientific issues are frequently settled within the circle, a greater circle of philosophical conviction. 

 

And this is the point that we have been saying again and again and again in this series, that it is not a situation of science versus the Bible, it is a situation of non-Biblical philosophy versus Biblical philosophy and science can be used as a neutral tool by either one.

 

Now that this is not just Seifriz’s statement written in 1936, by as late as 1960, in the book, Evolution After Darwin, the famous book that was written to celebrate the Darwinian centennial at the University of Chicago, this editor was Saul Tax; Tax was the editor of a symposium volume called Evolution After Darwin, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1960.  In Volume I on page 46 in an article entitled The Origin of Life, a Dr. Hans Gaffron, said, on page 36 of Volume I, (quote) “It is the general climate of thought which has created an unshakeable belief among biochemists that evolution of life from the inanimate is a matter of course.”  “It is the general climate of thought which has created an unshakeable belief.”  You see, here again is exactly what we’ve been saying, and these aren’t creationists that are writing this; this is the top scholars on the other side of the fence that are writing this and they flagrantly and clearly admit in their writings that this is not a scientific issue, it is a result of the general philosophical climate of our time that does this. 

 

And it is this climate of our time that the Bible describes as worldliness, and thus Christians must be made to see that the prime mover behind evolutionary thought is world thought, worldliness.  And I John 2:15-17 says “love not the world,” and too often fundamentalists have confused this with certain taboos of don’t do this and not doing that and doing this and not doing that when in reality the great issues are totally ignored.  The great issues are the philosophical issues that ride the climate of intellectual opinion in any given generation. 

 

Now to deal with the role of Chance in creating organic material from inorganic material—please understand that this is not really a treatment of the creation of life from the Biblical point of view but we will call it creation of life for the sake of discussion.  The prevalent idea today is that anything can happen if we give it enough time, regardless of how probabilism, in other words it might only be a one in a million chance that something happens, but if you wait a million years it will have happened.  Well, that’s true, that’s true, this is a true interpretation of statistical laws, this statistical statement.  If something is very, very improbable, if you give it enough time it will, by definition, come true.  This is true. 

 

But I would like to attack the role of Chance in the creation of organic material from two points of view.  These two points of view operate at two different ends of the process of creation of life.  The first thrust which we will make is directed at the question, even if something is improbable, do we have enough time in the history of the universe for life to have occurred, given the fact that life arose by Chance, a very improbable event but most people think that all you have to do is give it enough time.  My question is, given the bounds of the universe as known today, say 8 to 10 billion years of age, at least from the state where it was disorganized or chaotic, depending on what theory you use, do we have enough time just for straight Chance to operate? 

 

Thomas Huxley was once quoted as saying that if a million monkeys were to strike the keys of a million typewriters for a million years they might make a copy of a Shakespearean play.  Now Dr. David Heiser [sp?], biologist at Biola in Los Angeles, took Huxley up on this and fortunately this is the kind of statement that you can get mathematical teeth into and actually text.  So Dr. David Heiser tested this statement of Huxley’s and he made the following stipulations in his test just to see if it really is true that within a million years a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters could have done something.  Now that sounds like they could and this is the popular image of Chance.  But is it really true when you get down to the hard facts of the case.  So Dr. David Heiser tested it.  And he stipulated that the monkeys use only capital letters on the keyboard; he further stipulated that in addition to the capital letters there be seven punctuation keys and a spacing key.  He stipulated further that these monkeys were to type 24 hours a day at a rate of twelve and a half keys per second.  And instead of having to write an entire Shakespearian play they would only have to write Genesis 1:1 in the English, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” just one sentence.  

 

Now, can a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters over a million years at 24 hours a day, twelve and a half keys per second, with only the capital letters plus seven punctuation keys and a spacing key, could they type Genesis 1:1 in English.  Here, and I quote from Dr. David Heiser’s report, which is available in mimeographed form from Dr. Ryrie at Dallas Theological Seminary and I believe Dr. David Heiser at Biola would also have a copy of this, and I quote from that mimeographed report.  (Quote)  “The length of time it would take is indeed quite beyond our comprehension,” in other words, David Heiser is saying how long would it take the monkeys to type Genesis 1:1.  “Think of a large mountain,” Dr. David Heiser goes on, “which is solid rock; once a year a bird comes and rubs it beak on the mountain wearing away an amount equal to the finest grain of sand, that is, approximately 0.0025 of an inch, twenty-five thousandths of an inch.  “At this rate of erosion the mountain will disappear very slowly.”  You see, once a year a bird comes, rubs its beak on the mountain and wears away an amount equal to the finest grain of sand, about twenty-five thousandths of an inch in diameter.  “At this rate the erosion of the mountain would disappear very slowly, but when completely gone the monkey would still be just warming up.  Now think of a rock larger than the whole solar system, try to think of a rock so large that if the earth were at its center its surface would touch the nearest star, which is four light years away,” a light year being that length of space covered by light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, it will take four light years, it would take light four years to travel this distance, going 186,000 miles a second.  Now think of a mountain that tall, four light years tall.  “If a bird came once every thousand years and removed an amount equal to the smallest grain of sand,” now this bird is not coming once a year like the previous bird, this bird comes only once every thousand years, “and it removed an amount equal to the smallest grain of sand, twenty-five thousandths of an inch, only once every thousand years on a mountain four light years tall, it would take more than 400 such mountains would be worn away before our monkey would be expected to type Genesis 1:1.”

 

Now isn’t this amazing; it would take 400 mountains four light years in height, worn away at the way of twenty-five thousandths of an inch a year every thousand years, and it would take four hundred such rocks.  And of course, David Heiser adds, “Of course this is quite fantastic but it is evidence that a million monkeys would never type a Shakespearian play in a million years.  Similarly we believe the idea that lifeless matter could evolve by Chance into life we know on earth in a billion years or so is also fantastic.”  So the issue here, and this is the first attack against the concept of Chance as the mechanism responsible for moving from the inorganic to the organic.  The issue here is that there isn’t enough time for such low probability events to assuredly occur and so we are face to face, if you deal with the issue of Chance in the creation of life, you are face to face with a limitation of time.

Now there’s a second limitation that frequently is overlooked in this matter and that is the limitation of the second law of thermodynamics.  Once again we come face to face with the second law of thermodynamics.  The reason why this operates in the situation of getting organic material from non-organic material is because of the nature of the reaction.  If you could list on a piece of paper the steps that you would have to take to go from the inorganic to the organic, roughly speaking you would have four steps.  First you would have a step involving the elements and elementary inorganic compounds.  That’s your first step, inorganic compounds.  Second step: amino acids, if you’re building a building the amino acids would be equivalent to the bricks.  Then after amino acids the third step would be polypeptides; polypeptides if you’re building a building would be equivalent to one brick wall.  And the fourth step would be proteins; proteins being made of fifty to three thousand amino acids. 

 

So you have this four step; first inorganic compounds, then secondly amino acids, then thirdly polypeptides, then fourth proteins.  Now here’s the problem.  Even if you got amino acids by Chance from the inorganic compound, even if you were able to move from step one to step two by Chance, you now have a situation in which the second law begins immediately to destroy your product, for if the amino acids arise out of a chemical bath by Chance, the second law of thermo­dynamics acts to break the amino acids apart and move them back to the first step.  In other words, every step you take you’re fought by the second law of thermodynamics.  So not only do you have to overcome sheer chance but you have to overcome the natural tendency of the second law to destroy organization.  And since the amino acids are the exception, the tendency, the longer you wait, and this is the other side of the coin, most people think the longer  you wait your problems are over, but here suppose you move from step one to step two in this process, and you move from inorganic compounds to amino acids, the longer you take to move the more probability you have of going the opposite way because the second law favors 4, 3, 2, 1 sequence, and not a 1, 2, 3, 4 sequence.  So the longer you take, the more time you give the second law to destroy your product.  And so even if you got to step two by Chance, you have to get enough of the amino acids together so that they can combine to form polypeptides.  But while you’re waiting to get enough amino acids together to form your polypeptides the second law of thermodynamics is acting against you to destroy the amino acids that you’re trying to accumulate.  And so the longer you wait the higher the probability is that you won’t make it. 

 

Now Dr. Wilder-Smith in his new book called Man’s Origin, Man’s Destiny, put out by the Shaw Publishing Company at Wheaton, Illinois, on pages 63-70 discusses this.  And Dr. Wilder-Smith is a pharmaceutical man and a man interested in biochemistry and has a very good presentation of the role of the second law of thermodynamics in destroying this step sequence.  He devotes pages 63 to 70 on it and on these pages he has a very interesting illustration.  He proposes the following illustration.  Imagine you take an airplane, you rent an airplane and you have cars, gobs and gobs and gobs of many, many white cars, and you drop these out of the airplane.  And after you drop them out and the car has settled to the ground you fly over the ground to see if you can discern any pattern in which these cars fell to the ground.  Dr. Wilder-Smith asks the question, what is the chance of finding these cars all arranged in the pattern of your initials?  And in his case it would be WS.  To illustrate this fact that as you increase time, one could say all right, suppose we put parachutes on these cars so that they would come from the airplane to the ground very, very slowly, and this would be equivalent mathematically to increasing time so that people who need a lot of time to go from step one, inorganic compounds to amino acids, they say it will happen if you give it enough time, so mathematically we can test it.  Suppose we put parachutes on these cars and instead of taking them 20 minutes to go from the plane to the ground it takes twenty years to go from the plane to the ground because they have very, very light parachutes on them.  And one could say therefore, well if you give them enough time, the chances are somewhere along the line they will arrange themselves into initials. 

 

Now if you visualize this by putting parachutes on the cars, is the probability really increased?  No, because the randomness of the wind has distributed them all over the world.  So when you allow the steps toward life to sit and wait, and wait, and wait, suppose you go from step one to step two, you wait and wait and wait for the amino acids to combine to polypeptides so you can go to step three, you find out the longer you wait the amino acids are dissolving on you.  And so here again with the illustration of Dr. Wilder-Smith you have these cars floating down from the airplanes, the longer you wait the less probability there is of arranging themselves in a nice neat pattern on the ground because they are blown by the winds all over the world in twenty years; some are in North America, some are in Europe, some are over the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean, they are all over the place at the end of twenty years.  So by merely increasing time you do not increase the chance of formation of improbably things. 

 

Now going back to the monkey illustration, the monkey illustration illustrated the limitation of time.  The second limitation, the limitation of the second law of thermodynamics says something else.  In terms of the monkey illustration it would be this, that the monkey’s product on the typewriter would decompose.  In other words, the reason why the monkeys got a good probability was that once they typed Genesis 1:1 on that paper, it stayed there but suppose you had them type with lemon ink or something that would disappear.  Then they would have to type and wait and type again and you would therefore have the lemon ink dissolving on you and the longer you waited the less probability the monkeys would have of typing something sensible.

 

So in summary there are two limitations fighting you if you try to propose Chance as the mechanism for the origin of life.  First, there really isn’t enough time, even with the billions of years of the universe under the cosmic evolutionary hypothesis.  You’d have to hypothesize billions and billions and billions and billions and more billions of years to get life by sheer Chance.  And the second thing, that the second law constantly acts to destroy the process and here you have too much time.  So one of your limitations is that you don’t have enough time but the second limitation involving the second law is that you’ve got too much time and the longer you wait the more probability you have of decay. 

 

Now we would like to deal with two famous experiments done that many people quote or many people have heard of and these experiments are frequently used to say oh, creation of life is possible by Chance.  The first experiment we’d like to discuss is the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953.  Miller was one man and Urey was the other man.  The original report is found in Science Magazine, Volume 130, page 245 in 1959.  Briefly the experiment was like this: Miller and Urey set up a 500 milliliter container of water and a tube went from this container into a larger glass container or some container and the H­2O, the water vapor was mixed with methane and ammonia and then another tube went from this large container back to the water, and the water was heated.  Now an electric spark was sparked through the large container, so that here was the cycle: the water evaporated into water vapors, rose up through one tube into this large container where it was mixed with methane and ammonia, sparked by an electric arc, and then the products of the sparking were then fed back down into the water mixture.  And they discovered after the experiment was performed that they had produced certain amino acids, that mainly an amino acid by the name of glycine and amino acids had indeed been performed by Chance, and this experiment is frequently used to at least say that you can go from step one to step two by Chance. 

 

Now let’s look at this experiment very carefully.  First, Urey and Miller, in their report said, (quote), “Our discussion is based upon the assumption that conditions on the primitive earth were favorable for the formation of the organic compounds which make up life as we know it.”  So they were evolutionists to begin with, and this is an important assumption that they make, that the atmosphere, whatever it is, of the early primitive earth, must have been such as to cause this to occur.  And so what they were saying was that by fiddling around the laboratory and if we fiddle long enough we will find some atmosphere that will produce life, and therefore, this atmosphere that we discovered produced life is the one that the earth must have had.  This is only an assumption, not necessarily provable.

 

A second thing to notice about the experiment; the whole experiment was in a closed system and so therefore we have every right to say that whereas the people often say, oh you people who are trying to take the second law and apply it all over the place when it’s only valid for a closed system have no right so to do; well we can come right back and say then what right have you to take the results of the Miller-Urey experiment which were done in a closed system and apply them all over the place.  So it’s a two-edged sword.

 

Now one particular reaction that we like to notice in Urey and Miller’s experiment is the following reaction.  We’ll give the chemical formula of this reaction:  2CH 4 + NH3 +2H2O yields NH2CH2COOH + 5H2.  And of course this is ammonia and so on, water, etc. etc. yielding glycine, and of course this is an organic chemical equation and we have arrows going both ways; you can go from the left side of the equation to the right or you can go from the right side to the left.  Now the important thing is that the chemical on the right is glycine and so you have to make the equation go from the left to the right to produce amino acid, and Urey and Miller did not allow an equilibrium situation to develop inside their experiment.  In other words, what they did was that they were driving the equation from the left to the right so that as fast as the glycine and the ammonia and so on were made in their container they removed it through that bottom tube and so as fast as the product was made it was removed and since the product was removed it created an imbalance and the equation forced more to the right. 

 

In other words, you have somewhat the same thing when you step out of a hot shower and you step out into the cold bathroom.  Now if the bathroom window is shut and the doors are shut eventually, if it’s a small bathroom, the air in the bathroom will become saturated before you will become dry and so there will be water left on your skin and you will feel warm and sometimes even uncomfortably so.  But the water will stop evaporating from you skin when the humidity of the air in the bathroom reaches saturation.  Now if someone comes into the bathroom and opens the door immediately the water starts evaporating again from your skin.  The reason is because the person who opened the door removed water vapor from the room and forced more water vapor from you skin to evaporate into the air which had now dried.  So you see, for a moment you were in equilibrium condition, but the person opening the door removes water vapor from the room, disturbed the equilibrium and forced more evaporation to occur.  Well in a sort of roughly similar way this organic chemical equation is driven to the right in Urey and Miller’s experiment.  And of course, therefore, the results of Miller’s experiment was to produce more amino acids than would have been produced under sheer equilibrium conditions.  Now, the correct way to appraise Urey and Miller’s experiment is to redo the whole thing, this time in equilibrium conditions.  In other words, you do it without forcing the equation to the right; you do it by just letting the amount of glycine form that would form under equilibrium conditions without forcing it to form.  Just let it form by sheer Chance in an equilibrium environment. 

 

Now it also turns out, not only would you have lower amounts than Urey and Miller obtained in their experiment but you would also have much of the glycine destroyed by ultraviolet light, and here’s the reason why.  Normally, ultraviolet light that is very highly destructive of organic material, it is not destructive because we have oxygen which is transformed into ozone and the ozone in the high atmosphere acts as a blanket to keep away dangerous ultraviolet radiation.  But Urey and Miller found, and scientists before them found, that if you allow oxygen to be in the atmosphere of the primeval earth, then the oxygen burns up these amino acids as fast as they are formed.  In other words, it destroys them.  So in order not to destroy the organic materials you have to say that the primitive atmosphere of the earth had no oxygen.  But if you remove oxygen you remove ozone and if you remove ozone you remove that blanket to the ultraviolet radiation.  And therefore with the atmosphere that Uri and Miller proposed, a methane ammonia water vapor atmosphere, you would have ultraviolet light bombarding any product that was produced by Chance.  And so this glycine or this amino acid would be destroyed also by this ultraviolet light.

 

So now let’s examine what would happen if what Urey and Miller says happened really happened in a primitive atmosphere of the earth.  First, 97% of the glycine so produced would be destroyed by ultraviolet light, since the very atmosphere needed to produce this reaction can’t have [not sure of word, may be: much] oxygen which forms ozone to block the ultraviolet light.  So you see Urey and Miller had to set up a hypothetical atmosphere favorable to the chemical reaction but once they set up the atmosphere they got an atmosphere with a hole in it; a hole through which ultra­violet rays can burn anything that is made.  So that 97% of the glycine is destroyed. 

 

Now the 3% that’s left slowly drops down through the atmosphere onto the ocean, the primitive ocean; so the glycine in the top one hundred meters of the ocean would also be destroyed by ultraviolet light with a half life of 20 years, and the half life of any glycine operating in the whole ocean would be one thousand years.  And so it turns out that ultimately by Urey and Miller’s own experiment, if done in the primitive ocean with the primitive kind of atmosphere that they said happened in their experiment, we would have produced by equilibrium conditions, only one glycine molecule form between every ten to the twelfth power to ten to the twenty-seventh power molecules of water.  One glycine molecule, that is, for every million, million molecules of water to one glycine molecule for every billion, billion, billion molecules of water, and one therefore would say that it doesn’t give one much of a chance to get a concentrated enough amino acid, you see you’ve only gone from step one to step two and you’re not left with too much of step two and you’ve got to have quite a bit of step two to go from step two to step three. 

 

So with Urey and Miller’s experiment it seems to show exactly the opposite, namely that Chance is such a poor produce of amino acid that you couldn’t possibly have enough amino acid to develop to go the next step from step two to step three.  And this is just amino acid; we haven’t even talked about polypeptides or proteins, steps three and four. 

 

I’m indebted for much of this material to an article by Dr. Emmet L. Williams in the Creation Research Society quarterly of July, 1967, pages 30-35, in an article entitled (quote) “The Evolution of Complex Organic Compounds From Simpler Chemical Compounds,” (end quote).  On page 33 Dr. Williams quotes a man by the name of Hull who had written a paper to criticize Miller’s experiment and Hull’s conclusions were these.  (quote) “The conclusion from these arguments” and I have essentially presented you the main argument, “The conclusion from these arguments presents the most serious obstacle, if indeed it is not fatal, to the theory of spontaneous generation.  First, thermodynamic calculations predict vanishingly small concentrations of even the simplest organic compound.  Secondly, the reactions invoked to synthesize such compounds are seen to be much more effective in decomposing them.”  You see here you have your second law acting.  “Further, it must be remembered that both lines of argument become quantitatively of an overwhelmingly greater magnitude when organic compounds other than the very simplest are considered.”  And here Hull cites glucose, and he says suppose you took glucose which would be equivalent, roughly, to step four in our chain, Miller and Urey got to step two but suppose you wanted to go all the way to step four using the same thing.  “Under such conditions Hull estimates that you would produce one molecule of glucose for every trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion,” repeated eleven times, “water molecule.”  Obviously this is slightly impossible and Hull concludes, very rightly so, (quote), “The physical chemist guided by the proved principles of chemical thermodynamics and kinetics cannot offer any encouragement to the biochemist who needs an ocean full of organic compounds to form even life-less coacervates.” 

 

So the summary, therefore, of Urey and Miller’s experiment, which most people cite as proof of the Chance, proof that Chance can be a responsible agent in moving from the inorganic to the organic proves precisely the opposite thing.  It proves that Chance is such a poor produce that it couldn’t possibly have done the thing in any primitive earth atmosphere over the time limit.  So once again we’re faced with the two limitations cited previously, a limitation that we have too little time to operate and more so and much more importantly, we have a second limitation of the second law of thermodynamics destroying everything as fast as we can make it. 

 

Now I would like to move over to a second famous experiment performed in 1967 called the Kornberg experiment, Kornberg, who at that time I believe was working at Stanford University and he produced in 1967 what some people call life in a test tube.  In fact, in December of 1967 President Johnson went on the radio and announced that people would shortly be reading (quote) “the most important news story you have ever heard,” (end quote).  Our objective here is two-fold; first we want to show you how misleading the press story is, and secondly, show you the fantastic problem facing spontaneous generation in this new area of the Kornberg experiment.

 

For this we are indebted to an article by Dr. Wayne Friar in Creation Research Society Quarterly, June 1968, pages 34-41.  Dr. Friar says on page 39 of this article, Life in a Test Tube, “To refer to this recent research development as production of life in a test tube is plainly a dramatization of the research story.  Scientists recognize the accomplishment, not as the creation of a living organism, but rather as one enabling a DNA template to make a copy of itself in a test tube by a reproductive process normally occurring only within the bacterial cell.”  (End quote). 

Now let’s review Professor Friar’s remarks, particularly concerning the press report.  Was there really life made in the test tube on the Kornberg experiment.  What was the experiment?  To understand the experiment one must understand, very roughly any way, the issue of reproduction of viruses.  Now a virus is sort of a freak cell, part of a cell in other words, sort of like a nucleus that’s lost it’s outer sheath, or you might just visualize it as a piece of a cell.  Now the virus needs a real whole cell in order to reproduce itself.  And what happens, the virus comes along and attaches itself to what is known as a host cell and the chemicals and so on of the virus infiltrate the host cell, go inside the host cell, use materials (like a parasite) from the host cell, and make many viruses inside the host cell which then burst out through the cell wall and you have the reproduction of viruses.  So viruses reproduce by attaching themselves to host cells.

 

Now what Dr. Kornberg did was to show how viruses could reproduce outside of a host cell and what he did was to take chemicals from the host cell, put these chemicals in a test tube, and this is a very crude explanation but rough, Dr. Kornberg took the chemicals from the host cell, but the virus in the bath of these chemicals and out came many viruses.  So Dr. Kornberg, in a very careful and ingenious experiment, showed that viruses can reproduce themselves.  But life was not made in a test tube in the sense that man made it.  The reason why the viruses multiplied in Dr. Kornberg’s test tube was simply that he took the chemicals from the host cell…for example, you might take an automobile, metal, let’s say metal goes into an automobile factory and comes out an automobile.  Well what Dr. Kornberg did was take some of the machines out of the factory and put them out in the field, put the metal on the machines and out came the automobile.  And so what he did was simply transfer the location of the reproduction of the viruses from inside the cell to outside the cell.  But the chemicals were still the chemicals that he found in the cell; he did not make the chemicals, he simply took them from the host cell and put them in the test tube.  And so no life was really made; life was just reproduced in the test tube in the sense that it normally is reproduced in the cell.  And incidentally, two million dollars from the United States funds were spent in succeeding in doing this experiment. 

 

Now we’re not knocking this experiment because ultimately out of these kinds of experiments may come a cure for cancer so we wholeheartedly pray and hope for these experiments.  All we are trying to do is simply depict these experiments for what they really are, and stop this sensationalism that you read in the press or the TV or something else that somebody made in a test tube.  He did not make life in a test tube.

 

Now this introduces a second thing and that is this whole issue of DNA and cellular division and reproduction of life and it’s precisely here where advocates of spontaneous generation encounter another problem.  Not only do they encounter the problem, as we said before, the four step situation but we have another problem and for this I am indebted to the article by Dr. Duane T. Gish, in Creation Research Society Quarterly of June 1967, pages 13-17.  The article was entitled DNA its History and Potential.  And on page 15 Dr. Gish is speaking of this.  Now here’s the problem, roughly speaking what Dr. Gish is talking about.  In order to multiply you have to have a complicated machine and in particular you have to have a very, very complicated machine, what we call a living cell, and this machine has to work perfectly, all of its parts have to work perfectly before you can get another cell.  And the point here is that in order for life to have occurred by Chance you have to have the completion of a perfect machine instantaneously.  You can’t have part of the machine because it’s not going to work; it’s like having a car without a motor, it’s not going to go anywhere.  You can have a cell with some of these chemicals missing and it’s not going to multiply.  And in order for life to reproduce itself all, all of the parts of the cell have to be present and perfectly working.  And here’s the tremendous crisis that if you’re going to say that life arose by spontaneous generation, by sheer Chance, then you have got to find some way in which not just part of the cell came into existence.  See, we’re dealing on a fifth level, before those four steps I gave you before were simply to move from…one you move from inorganic compounds to amino acids to polypeptides to protein molecules.  But here now we’re dealing on the level of a cell.  You might say this is a fifth step.  Here you’ve got many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many different protein molecules united in the cell, and in order for that cell to reproduce itself you have got to have all of the parts of the cell perfectly working. 

 

So you have to go all the way up to step five in perfection in order to produce this thing by Chance and Dr. Gish writes on page 15, (quote): “Here evolutionists are faced with a dilemma.  The presence of a protein, the enzyme DNA polymerase is indispensable for the synthesis of DNA.  On the other hand, the information required for the synthesis of all protein is contained in the DNA.  In any evolutionary scheme which could have come first?  Protein is required for DNA synthesis and DNA is required for protein synthesis.  Which preceded the other?  The best answer seems to be that neither arose before the other but both have existed together from the beginning.”  And Dr. Gish discusses what is necessary for cellular growth.  For example, in the first step of cellular growth you have to have the cell activating the DNA, in other words, the cell in some way tells the DNA I want to make another cell.  So then the DNA, second step, produces what is known as RNA, two different versions of it.  Then the third step is the cell makes up the RNA according to the direction of the DNA.  So you have the first step, the cell tells the DNA I want another cell; secondly the DNA says okay cell, you make some RNA; the third step is the cell makes the RNA; then the fourth step, the cell builds a protein molecule according to the directions of the RNA.  And then finally, after it’s all made, then the cell shuts down the DNA. 

 

So you see, you have a tremendous problem here; you have a problem of cellular generation, cellular growth, generation of protein molecules that requires an interaction of various parts.  And roughly stated, without going into all the details, is that you have a tremendously complicated machine, like a Swiss watch, all the pieces have to work in order for the watch to go and all the pieces of the cell have to work before you get protein molecules.  And this is the whole point.

 

On page 17 Dr. Gish says, “As we learn more and more about DNA and how it functions in the cell we should view this great master plan with awesome wonder.  Its complexities and intricacies are beyond our comprehension, the results of the plan marvelous.  Who is it that conceived and brought this into being?  Unbelieving man, willingly ignorant, prefers to believe it was inherent in the properties of the neutron, growth by sheer Chance.  It seems to me immeasurably more reasonable to accept the clear proclamation of Scripture, “In the beginning God created.” 

 

So we find the third problem in facing the issue of spontaneous generation.  Not only do we have a lack of time, and not only do we have too much time because the second law works as long as time goes on to destroy your product, but the third limitation now is that you have to have a total machine perfectly working in order to reproduce itself.  On the molecular level this is the same thing as which came first, the chicken or the egg.

 

Now I’d like to conclude this section on can Chance explain the creation of life by quoting extensively from two sources.  The first one is a volume edited by Oparin in 1949 called The Origin of Life on Earth.  In it there was a man by the name of Dr. Irwin Chargaff, in an article entitled (quote) “Nucleic acids as carriers of biological information.”  And I want you to notice this quote because here you will see the evolutionist trying to get off the hook.  He recognizes that spontaneous generation just is so, so improbable that it just couldn’t be the explanation.  So rather than give up Chance and return to a doctrine of creation, they now say that the laws of chemistry were different back then.  In other words, the probabilities that we’ve worked on have all been based on the fact that the chemical laws now existed back then, so therefore they say that this is improbable so the next thing we have to do is hypothesize that somehow in some way the chemical laws were different back there than they are now.  And I think this is a very sarcastic reference that Dr. Chargaff has commented on all this speculation. 

 

He says, (quote), “Our time is probably the first in which mythology has penetrated to the molecular level.  I read, for instance, in a recent article by a very distinguished biologist, in the early phase of the molecular stage of evolution only simple molecules are formed; later more complex molecules, such as amino acids and perhaps simple peptides were formed.  In the more advanced phases of this period it is believed that there appeared a molecule with two entirely new properties, the ability to systematically direct the formation of copies of itself from an array of simple building blocks and the property of acquiring new chemical configurations without loss of ability to reproduce.  Thus,” Dr. Chargaff goes on commenting on this statement, “what started cosmically was beautiful and profound legend, has come down to a so-called macro molecule.  Is the cell really nothing but a system of ingenious stamping processes, stenciling its way from life to death?  My answer would be no, for I believe that our science has become too mechanomorphic,  that we talk in metaphors  in order to conceal our ignorance and that there are categories in biochemistry for which we lack even a proper notation, let alone an idea of their outlines and dimension.” 

 

Now later a Princeton Biologist by the name of Dr. Blum wrote a book called  Times Arrow and Evolution in 1955, which is the only...[tape runs out]

 

[Continued at the beginning of next tape]…and it’s a very scholarly work and a very important work to read.  It’s important for us to read because it shows at what lengths man, in order to defend spontaneous generation has to go when he comes face to face with the second law that says everything is decaying when he is saying by the evolutionary hypothesis everything is moving from disorder to order; the second law is saying everything is moving from order to disorder.  He writes, and this is a combination of quotes that I’ve taken from pages 163, page 170 and 178 of this volume. 

“Now let us examine the possibility of the spontaneous formation of protein molecules from a nonliving system.  We may assume, for purposes of argument, that in the course of chemical evolution there had already come into existence a mixture containing a great quantity of amino acids.”  Notice this, “a great quantity of amino acids,” when by Miller and Urey’s experiment we just showed that the great quantity of amino acids would amount to a mere one molecule for every ten to the twenty-seventh molecules of water.  Nevertheless, for some reason this probability didn’t work out and Blum says we already now, we’ve somehow surpassed this great barrier, and we have got successfully to step 2.  And now we have a lot of amino acids.  Now we’ve got to go to step three and four.  “As we have seen the free energy change for the formation of the peptide bond is such that at equilibrium, just about one percent of amino acids would be joined together as dipeptides.”  Remember the sequence that we had in our one, two, three, four step; amino acids to peptides, and what he’s talking about is the simplest of all peptides, the dipeptide, and he’s saying that only one percent of the amino acids, and the amino acids themselves only total one molecule for every ten to the twenty-seventh molecules of water, so you have only one percent of those jointed together as dipeptides.  “Granting the absence of appropriate catalysts the chances of forming tripeptides would be about one hundredths that of forming dipeptides and the probability of forming a polypeptide, of only ten amino acids as units would be something like ten to the minus twenty.”  That is, less than one in a billion billion.  “The spontaneous formation of a polypeptide,” that’s step three in our chain, “of the size of the smallest known protein, seems beyond all probability.  This calculation alone presents serious objections to the idea that all living matter and systems are designed from a single protein molecule which was formed by Chance. The riddle seems to be: how, when no life existed, did substances some into being which today are absolutely essential to living systems, yet which can only be formed by those living systems?  A number of major properties are essential to living systems as we see them today, the origin of any of which from a random system is difficult enough to conceive, let alone the simultaneous origin or them all.” 

 

And simply said, all Blum is saying is that going back to that one, two, three, four sequence it’s hard to get from one to two; Miller and Urey got one molecule in step two out of ten to the twenty-seven molecules of water, that was the concentration in equilibrium.  Now if you go from step two to three, Blum says, that of those molecules, one in ten to the twenty-seventh, you only get ten to the minus twentieth of those to go to the next step, step three.  And so therefore to go to step four is totally inconceivable.  And Blum of course recognizes this. 

 

And thus Chance has proven to be inadequate to cause spontaneous generation and therefore either one of two things have to be true; either life was different back in the primeval days, and this is wholly speculative, or, God created.  If we take one then the laws of chemistry were different; if we take the first alternative, namely that the laws were different back then, then science basically is cut off from any speculation.  Or two, we can take the doctrine of creation, that God created it, He overcame the high improbabilities. 

 

Now some closing comments.  I’d like to quote from one more man, Marcel J. E. Golay, in an article, Reflections of a Communications Engineer on pages 1378-1382 of the September 1961 issue of Proceedings of the IRE.  The IRE is the Institute of Radio Engineers.  Golay is famous for his work on information theory, and very simply stated, all this is is the application of the second law of thermodynamics to the problem of conveying information.  Information is conveyed in units and these units are called bits, bits of information.  And it turns out using this information theory, to make a long story short, that you can measure the amount of information in anything by measuring the number of bits it contains.  For example, if you were to build a house the amount of information you would need to build that house would be equal to a certain number of bits of information and Golay, in this paper, states the questions:  “What is the number of bits necessary for a machine to have at its disposal to make a copy of itself.”  In other words, just how complicated could you have a machine before the machine would be complicated enough so that it would know enough to build a copy of itself.  And you can immediately see this is parallel to the biological problem of having a cell or a protein molecule large enough to reproduce itself.  So it’s a parallel problem and Golay’s remarks are very important in this regard.  He’s asking how much information could be accumulated by Chance in order for enough information to be accumulated so that you could have a machine that would build itself; this is exactly equivalent to the biological problem of having a cell sophisticated enough, or having a situation in which you have such a structure as a protein molecule that would reproduce itself, and here’s what he says on page 1380 of his article.

 

“By making the most favorable assumptions as to the conditions in which this spontaneous creation of life could have occurred on this earth, we do not come anywhere near the spontaneous assembly of 1500 bits.”  See, that’s the minimum amount of information necessary.  “We can account for, perhaps, one tenth that number.  Do not shrug this off as being only order of magnitude off; this involves a factor of ten in the exponent and there is a vast difference between the probability of one part in two to the one hundred and fiftieth part and one part in two to the fifteen hundredth power.  Then you might say, ‘but it could have happened in many places in our universe and if it did not happen here we would not be here to talk about it.’  Very well then, multiply two to the one hundred and fiftieth power by the number of stars in the universe, that is by the number of potential solar systems in the universe and you obtain two to the two hundred and twentieth power, still short of the mark.  And yet life did begin, and looking back in time we see two mysteries, or at least two unlikely events: the first, the creation of the universe, the second, the creation of life.  We may even someday have an unlikely biochemist who will assemble radical by radical an unlikely large molecule which can reproduce itself.” 

 

Now this last sentence of Golay’s article is very important to notice and I want to use this sentence to introduce a remark and the conclusion of this section of Chance as an explanation for the origin of living from nonliving material.  He concludes this paragraph with this sentence, (quote): “But this would not resolve the historical mystery of the creation of the first living molecule.”  Notice this, this is important in the debate of the creation of life by man in the test tube; even if a chemist were to create a protein molecule, which conceivably this could be done…conceivably it could be done, it could not be done under the conditions of Chance, we’d be waiting from now until eternity for it to happen by Chance, but if chemists were to overcome sheer Chance, and by the way therefore overcome the only process evolution now allows to be responsible, but if chemists were to overcome Chance it is perfectly conceivable in our generation that we would have the generation of a man-made protein molecule.  But what would this prove?  It would prove only that a chemist could make one.  That’s all it proves, only that a chemist can make one.  And that’s the only thing it proves; it does not prove how it happened in the historical past; it only proves that man now can make one. 

 

Therefore, we want to conclude on this note and say that the creation of living organic material from nonliving inorganic material is a problem of design.  It’s a problem that requires a lot of order, and when we try to explain such a thing by chance we kill ourselves trying to do it.  Chance is just no more an adequate explanation of the origin of this life as taking the pieces of a Swiss watch, putting them in a paper bag, jangling them for two years and at the end of two years out will come the Swiss watch all assembled.  And I think that this is a very interesting analogy and the more chemist delve into the mechanics of the cell and the biochemistry of the cell and the molecules and so on, it’s interesting, the more respect they have for the delicacy and the complexity of the mechanism in the cell.  And the more complicated the mechanism the less likely Chance is responsible for its generation. 

 

So one has to keep this in mind, that we’re talking about Chance now and we’ve shown in the first set of our discussion that Chance is a very destructive way of explaining the origin of the universe because it destroys science.  If the origin of the universe is by Chance then the end of the universe is also by Chance and we have no continuity from day to day.  And Chance is inadequate to explain the origin of living from nonliving material and at this point we are careful to remind you that we are talking now about simple living protein molecules; we’re not talking about animal life.  And it seems that animal life or real life according to Scripture is not between plants and nonliving material but between animal and plants.  So on the hierarchy of creation, if you have a list, man, animal, plants, nonliving, we tend to place the big boundary between nonliving and plant and the Bible places the big boundary between plant and animal.  Therefore, when chemists have created a protein molecule they have not shown that this is the way it was created in history; they have not created life in the Biblical sense of the word and these two factors must be kept in mind.

 

Now one closing note, and that is, there is one place in Scripture where not just simple plant life is created, but actual animal life with a spirit is created and that is in Revelation 13:15.  We read there of activities occurring during the Great Tribulation and with Satan highly active and in verse 15, “And he has power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worships the image of the beast should be killed.”  And the word for “life” here is pneuma, or spirit.  And “he has power to give spirit unto the image of the beast,” and I would say here we have one situation where there is an exception to the general idea that I am conveying here, that namely men may well create a living form but these living forms are not life in the Biblical sense of the word.  Life in the Biblical sense of the word is a situation where you have spirit in union with matter and plants have no spirit in matter and therefore they do not qualify as life in the Biblical sense of the word.

 

Now I must deal with Revelation 13:15 because one could cite this as proof that well, creation not only of plant life but of animal life is obviously possible because of Revelation 13:15, to which I would reply that yes, this may be true, but then I would ask why is it that the image of the beast come to life in the tribulation is such an eye-opener?  Why is this image, one would therefore wonder why this image would cause so much stir if it was true that man by this time in history had been able to put spirit into union with matter.  I rather doubt that man ever will cross the boundary between the plant and animal kingdom.  I expect him to create giant protein molecules, I don not expect him to create genuine life, living souls in the spiritual sense of the word.  And I would even include Revelation 13:15 in this regard because here it takes Satan to do it, the genius of all time.

 

Now this concludes at least two-thirds of our discussion on Chance and we’ve discussed Chance in the issue of the creation of the universe and we have discussed Chance in the issue of creation of life and our next discussion will be on Chance and the maintenance of the evolutionary mechanism down through history.