Hey Family, 

Im reading a book (I think I have already mentioned before) "How Now Shall We Live?" and i just finished reading this awesome section from it last night. And i want to share my notes (most of it is direct from the book) on it. Be prepared, its long.

The way scientist try to prove that life arose in the primitive seas is to re-create the same conditions in the laboratory and see what happens. Best-known experiments occurred in 1953, Stanley Miller of the University of Chicago. Miller had mixed simple chemicals and gases in a glass tube, then zapped them with an electrical charge to induce chemical reactions. The idea was to simulate conditions on the early earth and show that simple chemicals could indeed have reacted to create the building blocks of life. What emerged at the other end of the laboratory apparatus were amino acids, the building blocks of protein, and important constituent of living things. The conventional wisdom is that they support the theory that life evolved spontaneously from simple chemicals in a primeval pond about four billion years ago. But do they?

             The amino acids that came out of Miller’s test tube differ in critical ways from those found in living things. Basically amino acids come in two forms, “Left-handed” and “Right-handed.” Living things are highly selective: They use only the left-handed form not both and not right-handed. But when Miller and his colleagues mixed chemicals in the laboratory, they got both kinds- Left-and right-handed—and even 50/50. IN FACT, this is what happens every time anyone mixes the chemicals randomly in the lab. All of this means that the amino acids formed in the test tube are useless for life.

            The next step to “creating life” is to get amino acids to link up and form proteins. In 1958 Sidney Fox, a chemist started with already existing amino acids and boiled them in water to induce them to react with one another. The result was proteinlike chains of amino acids.

            But there are problems with this. The proteins in LIVING things are comprised of amino acids hooked together in a VERY particular chemical bon called a peptide bond. BUT amino acids are capable of hooking together in all sorts of different ways, forming several different chemical bonds. And in the test tube, that’s exactly what they do. They hook up in a variety of ways, never producing a genuine protein capable of functioning in a living cell.

            If proteins are going to be functional, the amino acids must link up in a particular sequence. If you scramble them up, you get nonsense. In laboratory experiments, all they got was scrambled, random sequences.

            Even the most successful origin-of-life experiments tell us next to nothing about what could have happened under natural conditions. They tell us only what happens when a brilliant scientist manipulates the conditions, “coaxing” the materials down the chemical pathway necessary to produce the building blocks of life. So what do these experiments really prove? That life can be created only by an intelligent agent directing, controlling, and manipulating the process. The latest scientific findings do not discredit biblical faith; rather, they provide positive evidence that the origins of life require an intelligent agent, a creator.