Some Scientists Are Beginning to Sound a Lot Like Creationists

An article by Michael Marshall at New Scientist discusses theories about how the first life originated (abiogenesis). His article is behind a paywall, but his lede sounds very much like what creationists have been telling us now for decades, although I'm sure both he and the scientists he mentions would be aghast at that suggestion.

Here's his opening:

When Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, it was a sterile ball of rock, slammed by meteorites and carpeted with erupting volcanoes. Within a billion years, it had become inhabited by microorganisms. Today, life covers every centimetre of the planet, from the highest mountains to the deepest sea. Yet, every other planet in the solar system seems lifeless. What happened on our young planet? How did its barren rocks, sands and chemicals give rise to life?

Many ideas have been proposed to explain how it began. Most are based on the assumption that cells are too complex to have formed all at once, so life must have started with just one component that survived and somehow created the others around it. When put into practice in the lab, however, these ideas don’t produce anything particularly lifelike. It is, some researchers are starting to realise, like trying to build a car by making a chassis and hoping wheels and an engine will spontaneously appear.

The alternative – that life emerged fully formed – seems even more unlikely. Yet perhaps astoundingly, two lines of evidence are converging to suggest that this is exactly what happened. It turns out that all the key molecules of life can form from the same simple carbon-based chemistry. What’s more, they easily combine to make startlingly lifelike “protocells”. As well as explaining how life began, this “everything-first” idea of life’s origins also has implications for where it got started – and the most likely locations for extraterrestrial life, too.

With due respect to these researchers, the probabilities of life arising solely by chance either gradually or especially spontaneously are so daunting, so miraculous, that it requires an enormous exertion of blind faith to believe that it happened. To have a "living" cell there must not only be a container for the cellular organelles, there must be a functioning metabolism, and most difficult of all a functioning genetic system that is able to create proteins as well as replicate itself and the cell.

It is astronomically improbable that each of these formed themselves by chance independently and spontaneously, much less that they all formed themselves simultaneously and at the same location (see the eleven minute video below).

Yet if one is a naturalist there's apparently no limit to the amount of credulity one is able to muster to maintain belief in undirected nature's ability to perform such miracles.

On the other hand, intelligent agents perform complex feats of creation every day, feats that chance would find impossible to achieve in trillions of years. Unfortunately, there's no room in a naturalist ontology for an intelligent agent to have been active in the creation of life, so, it's amusing that some origin or life researchers are coming around to the view that life was indeed created in a burst, just like creationists have always said, but that no Creator was involved.

The idea of a spontaneous origin of life calls to mind the much-quoted conclusion of Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow, an agnostic astronomer, famously wrote:

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.