Research scientist Phil Burcham demonstrates the implausibility of the abiogenesis theory. In 1952 Harold Urey presumptuously claimed:
Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the earth.
Stanley Miller sought to test this theory, trying to simulate early Earth conditions. As Burcham explains:
He infused a glass chamber with steam, methane, hydrogen gas and ammonia before subjecting it to a sustained electrical discharge, thereby reproducing the lightning or solar energy that irradiated the early Earth.
Apparently, later “Miller was thrilled to detect many amino acids – the key building-blocks of proteins, the essential constituents of all living cells.” So in 1953 he reasoned:
If their apparatus had been as big as the ocean and if it had worked for a million years instead of one week, it might have created something like the first living molecule.
Still today hardline Darwinian devotees crank out the following propaganda:
…if building blocks could form spontaneously within an early Earth atmosphere, these monomers would then assemble into proteins and DNA. Eventually… fats emerged to form the membrane structures that surround all living cells. After proteins and nucleic acides accumulated within these fat droplets, these ‘protocells’ began reproducing themselves. A billion or so years later, home sapiens emerged.
Burcham observes that the reality, however, is different. The field of abiogenesis is in a pitiful state. Why? Because “the abiogenesis theory was mugged by reality.” Because the proponents of abiogenesis use the analogy of ‘chemical soup’ Burcham borrows this metaphor to illustrate some intractable problems with this theory:
1. When making soup, success depends on the intelligent selection of the correct ingredients, e.g. very different ingredients for pumpkin soup as opposed to French onion or cream of mushroom soup. So, Burcham reasons, if one was making soup and mixed in ALL of the herbs, spices, flavourings and additives available in the local supermarket, while all the right ingredients would be present the presence of all the wrong ingredients would spoil the soup.
Burcham points out:
…proteins and DNA only form when highly purified building blocks are present in the appropriate proportions under the correct experimental conditions. The “one-pot” reaction used by Miller, in which mixtures of energised gases react randomly to generate hundreds if not thousands of products, is simply not conducive to the formation of highly of highly complex structures such as protein or DNA, a conclusion that emerges from many repeats of his experiments. It is an invariable rule of chemistry that the larger the number of chemicals present in a reaction system, the higher the probability of unfruitful side-reactions and the lower the yield of desirable products. The atheist belief that appreciable quantities of DNA or proteins formed willy-nilly in crude mixtures containing hundreds of chemicals is wildly optimistic (my emphasis).
2. The successful preparation of a particular soup depends on using the correct liquid stock, e.g. beef stock for minestrone; chicken fo chicken noodle soup; bacon for pea and ham.
Burcham observes:
…the preparation of complex macromolecules is strongly influenced by the liquid in which the starting materials are dissolved. This is a key problem for abiogenesis theories, since the most abundant liquid on planet Earth – water – is arguably the worst solvent possible when assembling amino acids into a protein, or deoxhynucleotides into DNA… yet the biologists who write high school or fresher biology texts persist in telling us that life emerged in watery tidal pools on the edge of oceans on the early Earth (my emphasis).
3. The cooking process must be halted at an appropriate time to produce a successful soup.
Burcham comments:
…in an atheist universe, nobody has the brains to limit the cooking time during the preparation of the ‘chemical soup’. The same bolts of lightning or UV radiation that originally drove any production of proteins or DNA would ruthlessly destroy these substances over the long term.
Burcham considers what has been discovered following Watson and Crick’s solving of the ‘double helix’ structure of DNA:
The modern picture of even a simple bacterial cell is of a remarkable miniscule factory packed with stunning gene networks and hundreds of multi-component molecular machines.
Burcham concludes that “the amazing machines that form the basis for life point clearly to a transcendent creative intelligence.”
He also comments:
The fact that random abiogenesis still receives blissful endorsement in biology textbooks testifies only to the enduring power of materialism, not the scientific merits of the theory.
He concurs with Bavinck:
Materialism loves to pass itself off as an exact science, but it can be easily demonstrated that, both historically and logically, it is the fruit of human thought, a matter of both the human heart and the human head.
Source: “Dud Recipe” in Australian Presbyterian (February 2011) 10-11
Posted March 20, 2011
www.facetofaceintercultural.com.au
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