Did Life Originate By Chance?

The Encyclopedia Americana noted "the extraordinary degree of complexity and of organization in living creatures" and stated: " A close examination of flowers, insects or mammals shows an almost incredibly precise arrangement of parts." British astronomer Sir Bernard Loveli, referring to the chemical composition of living organisms, wrote: "The probability of....a chance occurrence leading to the formation of one of the smallest protein molecules is unimaginably small....It is effectively zero."

Similarly, astronomer Fred Hoyle said: "The entire structure of orthodox biology still holds that life arose at random. Yet, as biochemists discover more and more about the awesome complexity of life, it is apparent that the chances of it orginating by accident are so minute that they can be completely ruled out. Life cannot have arisen by chance."

Molecular biology, one of the more recent fields of science, is the study of living things at the level of genes, molecules, and atoms. Molecular biologist Michael Denton comments on what has been found: "The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event." "But it is not just the complexity of living systems which is so often manifest in their design." "It is at a molecular level where...the genius of biological design and the perfection of the goals achieved are most pronounced."

Denton further states: "Everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance. Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which - a functional protein or gene - is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man?" He also states: "Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive." And a professor of physics, Chet Raymo, states: "I am dazzled....Every molecule seems miraculously contrived for its task."

Molecular biologist Denton concludes that "those wh still dogmatically advocate that all this new reality is the result of pure chance" are believing in a myth. In fact, he calls the Darwinian belief regarding living things arising by chance "the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century."


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