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by Steve Risner

Have you ever gotten into a discussion with someone who believes in evolution? In any of those conversations, did the origin of life ever come up? “You don't know what you're talking about! That's not part of the theory of evolution!” This is a very common claim by evolutionists primarily because abiogenesis (life coming from non-life) stops Darwinism before it can even get started. So they stomp their feet and tell you that you don't understand evolution. Is this claim valid?

Every commonly used textbook out there on biology talks about evolution. You wanna guess how they start the conversation? That's right—with life coming from non-life. If this has nothing to do with Darwinism, why is it taught WITH evolution in every biology text? The truth is, the two ideas—abiogenesis and universal common descent—are inseparably married. Mutations and natural selection cannot act on genetics, and populations of life cannot get started from non-living matter; that's why they throw a fit when you bring it up. And, of course, the “go to” for them is to say the person bringing up abiogenesis doesn't understand evolution. This tends to shut down discussion (which makes them happy since the topic is embarrassing for them). Is there some merit to abiogenesis? Let's take a look.

Abiogenesis is defined as the original evolution of life or living organisms from inorganic or inanimate substances. Funny how the definition includes the word “evolution” right in it. Google even claims that a synonym for abiogenesis is spontaneous generation. Spontaneous generation was believed by many for a long time to be a real thing. Spontaneous generation is the production of living organisms from nonliving matter. This sounds a lot like abiogenesis, but let's not split hairs. Louis Pasteur, who was a pioneering scientist in the fields of biology, microbiology, and chemistry, looked into this over 150 years ago. He was not friendly to Darwin's theory and, as a result, this was part of his motivation for conducting experiments concerning abiogenesis. His work proved that life does not come from non-living material and even resulted in the Law of Biogenesis. This law states that life arises from pre-existing life, not from nonliving material. This law stands in direct contradiction to the idea that life originally arose from non-living material. This is one of at least a few laws of nature that evolutionists (and atheists in general) need to suspend for their origins myth to seem tenable. They rely strictly on natural/material processes to explain everything in the universe, even though many laws of science must be ignored in order for them to defend their religious beliefs. Some go so far as to say that spontaneous generation is the idea that life can come from non-life “under normal circumstances.” Cute, I know. They modify the meaning just a little so it doesn't make them look witless. “Under normal circumstances” doesn't help them, it simply begs the question, “What circumstances would allow for life to evolve from non-living matter?” There is literally no scientific answer for this question.

So if you bring up spontaneous generation to an evolutionist, they'll tell you that this has nothing to do with abiogenesis (although their definitions are essentially identical). The explanation they'll give is that spontaneous generation was only about fully-formed and complex organisms like mice or maggots and abiogenesis is about the first self-replicating living thing. In other words, they believe exactly in spontaneous generation but want to say they don't so they don't look foolish. Do you see why? With abiogenesis and spontaneous generation, the difference is the complexity of the organism. The difference is very much like the difference in saying that a fairy tale says that a frog can become a prince after a kiss from a princess, but if you allow for hundreds of millions of years in between with innumerable generations, evolutionists believe an amphibian will eventually evolve into a human. The factor of time is really the only difference. So they believe in spontaneous generation, but only of a single-celled organism. Keep in mind that individual cells are mindbogglingly complex. You can read about that here. It was okay for Darwin to believe that a single-celled organism could spontaneously generate because he didn't know any better. He basically believed a cell was a tiny bag of goo with not much happening there. Now we know that cells are fantastically complicated and have a ridiculous number of things going on inside them at all times. To believe anything even approaching a cell could spontaneously pop into being—from non-living to living—is naive at this point. We can give Charles Darwin a pass for thinking something we know now is so absurd. He's credited by some as the greatest biologist of all time (even though he didn't hold a single scientific degree), yet his “theory” at its very foundation was an impossibility—literally. I know, I know, they're not related… but they really are.

There has been no successful attempt to make life in a test tube. They've tried for a long time because they want to support Darwinism. There have been many experiments over the decades, and none have produced anything even close to a living thing. This is because I believe life is not merely a chemical reaction. Life is not what chemistry just does. Genetics (which in and of itself makes a mockery of Darwinism) forces chemistry to do what it normally would not. And, truly, if someone managed to piece together something they claimed was alive in a lab from non-living material, they would need to provide the programming to run the organism they manufactured. They would, in essence, be supporting Intelligent Design—the idea that life demands an intelligent Creator—since they'd have used their intelligence to produce whatever it was they claimed was alive. DNA is a storage device that holds the code to build living things. DNA is the medium by which the blueprints are stored to make people, puppies, and pine trees. Where did this code come from? A code, by necessity, has an intelligent source and is intended to be deciphered by an intelligent recipient. I'm getting off topic, so let me bring it back to the point.

Abiogenesis is very clearly a fundamental part of the atheist origins myth. If we can't get life from non-living matter, then the rest of the story isn't even important. Theistic evolutionists will try to suggest that they get a pass here—they have God. Atheists have to believe in magic because they need abiogenesis to be something real. But theistic evolutionists think they've got it figured out. God made this stuff happen, right? Either this or they truly have no use for God whatsoever—He just stood by helplessly watching while nature (the real god of theistic evolution) did the impossible. Either way, you can't separate the two—life from non-life and universal common descent go hand in hand.

Further, we can take the atheist's need to explain the universe without God even deeper in time. The atheist wants to explain life from non-life to get to universal common descent, but what about the evolution of the solar system? Where did earth come from? The explanation my son told me they gave him in school made me laugh out loud. How did stars evolve? Yeah, they have stories they like to tell about it, but they've got not a shred of evidence for such things. They like to talk about “star nurseries” and other interesting ideas, but we've only seen stars die, not be born. Now, “star nurseries” may be a thing. My worldview doesn't care about that really, although the ideas are intriguing. They like to talk about Pop III stars (which have never been observed by the way) which have apparently all died out but made it possible for all the other stars and the heavier elements to exist. You see how they do that? They just make up stories, pass them off as settled science, and no one bothers to ask questions. Then we go all the way back to the beginning of the universe. It's hilarious they want to suggest they know anything about it. And here we have more laws of science violated in order to allow for the atheist's origins myth. Sadly, some theistic evolutionists are on board with all of this as well. Not all, but many. They battle Bible-believing Christians and they'll join forces with God-hating militant atheists to do it. All this time, they'll suggest they're Christians, too.

Let's keep in mind that universal common descent (often simply termed “evolution” so as to add confusion) is absolutely incompatible with Christianity. And let's keep in mind that universal common descent is completely incompatible with science and reality.

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