"Creation versus Evolution" is a commonplace phrase now as two
major types of thought about the origins of our universe have emerged.
In this paper I will present the two sides, scientific and Christian,
of a smaller portion of this question: how exactly life emerged on
Earth.  The scientific theories on this subject mostly center about
the idea that life arose spontaneously and due to entirely natural
causes in the conditions present on Earth at that time.  The Christian
view is that life on Earth was purposely created by God, although
Christians disagree on the scientific accuracy of the Genesis creation
story.  Thus, in principal, the two views can be reconciled somewhat
because God could have accomplished His creation throughout the
spontaneous emergence of life from reacting chemicals, although many
scientists see no need for a Creator if life arose in this way and
many Christians find this viewpoint incompatible with their idea of an
active personal God.  As I will show, neither theory has succeeded in
proving its validity or in disproving the validity of the other, and
that therefore ultimately the choice of which theory to believe and
how much they can reasonably be combined is a question of observing
the nature of the world around us and considering the social and
personal ramifications of the choice.
	The first question we must ask when investigating the origin
of life on Earth is "What differentiates life from nonlife?"  The
scientific community has generally agreed on what is known as the
Darwinian definition of life, which is that "Life is a self- sustained
chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution" (Chyba
217).  This definition implies that life be capable of mutating and
reproducing these mutations and also of carrying out metabolic, or
energy processing, functions (217).  Thus life is also often defined
as being "synonymous with the possession of genetic properties"
(Horowitz 13) since the DNA (RNA)-enzyme system is the only known
system capable of mutating and reproducing its mutations in such a way
as to allow natural selection to occur, as well as of controlling
metabolism through the synthesis of enzymatic proteins (9-10).
According to this strict definition of life, compartmentalization is
not a necessary condition for life, but some scientists add also the
requirement of a membrane-like enclosure, emphasizing the need for the
life to trap raw materials needed for metabolism and reproduction and
to rid itself of waste products (Chyba 218 and Horowitz 11).  Horowitz
notes that past thought has ascribed a nonphysical "vital force" to
life that is defined as the essential something that separates life
from nonlife and is responsible for life's appearance of "conscious
purpose," but he asserts that now science "knows" that life and
nonlife differ only in the way that their molecules are combined (2).
I am personally suspect at such a claim because if a nonphysical force
differentiating animate from inanimate matter were to exist, there
would of course be no way to prove or disprove its existence, since it
would be a nonphysical force, not subject to scientific testing.
Sullivan mentions that another defining characteristic of life is its
tendency to defy the second law of thermodynamics, which states that
the universe progresses towards disorder, and to instead organize
itself into extremely complex systems.  This fact is theorized to be
due to a phenomenon of the tendency for "large, seemingly chaotic
systems, including large biological molecules, to organize themselves"
(140).  Ilya Prigogine, the leading theorist on this point, uses this
theory to explain the appearance of life despite the incredible
difficulties on which I will elaborate later that lay in the path to
the spontaneous appearance of life from nonlife (141).  An opposite
view is espoused by Johnson when he says that ".there is absolutely no
mystery about why living organisms appear to be the product of
intelligent creation..The reason living things give that appearance is
that they actually are what they appear to be." (Johnson2 108).  Thus,
for Johnson the defining characteristic of life is that it not only
appears to be, but actually is the organized result of intelligent
creation rather than the haphazard result of random chemical reactions
that eventually developed an order.  Regardless of the view taken, it
is an inescapable fact that life as we now know it even in its most
basic forms has an extremely complex organization, and I personally
have difficulty believing that this fact could be explained by a
random tendency towards organization among complex systems.
	Once we have an idea of what exactly constitutes life, the
next question we need to answer in trying to reconstruct the origin of
life on Earth is: "What was the exact form of the first life to appear
on Earth?"  The first problem that scientists confront when they try
to answer this question is the traditional chicken-and-egg paradox
that results from the fact that proteins are synthesized according to
the instructions contained in nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), but nucleic
acids cannot be formed without the help of enzymatic proteins (Chyba
236 and Horowitz 10).  A discovery in the early 1980s showed a
possible resolution to the problem of whether nucleic acids or
proteins were produced first.  It was discovered that certain RNA's
had enzymatic capabilities and that it was therefore possible that the
first life on earth were strands of RNA that could reproduce and
catalyze reactions with themselves (Sullivan 137).  However, the
problem with this theory is that in order for RNA to be synthesized in
the first place from the components that were imagined to be available
on the primitive Earth, a "miracle-like coincidence" would have had to
occur because the chemical reactions that form the separate components
of the RNA nucleotide are chemically incompatible (Behe 171).
Furthermore, not all RNA's have enzymatic capabilities, so it would
take "a second miraculous coincidence" to have exactly the right kind
of RNA be produced from the hypothetical mix of chemicals from which
life is said to have sprung (172).  Another proposed theory is that,
since the Miller- Urey experiment simulating early atmospheric
conditions showed that amino acids could be fairly readily produced in
Earth's imagined primitive conditions, perhaps the first forms of life
on Earth were proteins that were capable of self-reproduction
(Sullivan 137).  In the 1950s Sidney Fox heated dissolved amino acids
and noted that "proteinoid" spheres that had enzyme properties,
pseudo-membranes, and the ability to "proliferate, evolve, and produce
nucleic acids" were formed from the mixture (138).  However, the
importance of Fox's work is questioned by many members of the
scientific community because his experiment relied on exact
premeasured ratios of amino acids in a hot dry environment whose
existence on primitive Earth is questionable and did not even produce
real proteins (Behe 170).
 The final major western theory of the first type of life to emerge on
Earth is the theory espoused in the Bible.  However, depending upon
interpretation, the Bible contradicts itself on this point.  Genesis
1:11 (NIV) says that the first type of life on earth was ".vegetation:
seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in
it, according to their various kinds."  Genesis 2:7 says that "the
Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground." when "no shrub
of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field
had yet sprung up" (Genesis 2:5).  Thus, the creation order put forth
in Genesis 2 contradicts the creation order listed in Genesis 1.  I
therefore believe that the Genesis stories of creation are not
intended to explain literally how God is said to have created life on
Earth, and thus which form was created first, but rather to emphasize
to the early Hebrews, who did not have the scientific sophistication
to even begin to understand the technicalities of how life arose on
Earth, that the world was created purposefully by a loving Creator.  I
believe this is the intended important moral of the Genesis version of
creation and that the Bible does not purport to explain how exactly
life on earth was created, but it does assert that the life that is
here was specifically created by intelligent design.  It is this
second assertion that I believe most Christians are more likely to
view as being in conflict with certain scientific theories on the
origin of life on Earth than the Genesis order of creation.  Having
said that, I will now present a list of modern scientific theories as
to how exactly life on Earth came to be.  The key components to note
in all of them is that the initial conditions that were present on
earth right before life came into being can never be known exactly and
that life has never been successfully shown to arise spontaneously
from adding an energy source to the supposed material present on
ancient Earth, although almost all of the basic components of life
have in fact been synthesized in this manner.  Probably the most
popular current theory on how exactly life began is the "primordial
soup" model (Goldsmith 190).  In summary, this model proposes that the
Earth's early atmosphere about four and a half billion years ago was
mostly carbon and nitrogen gases with a little free hydrogen and no
free oxygen.  These gases formed organic molecules when subjected to
an energy source like UV radiation from the sun or lightning and these
molecules then formed a "primordial soup" of organic material on the
Earth's surface.  Also, some of the organic material may have been
brought in by comets or meteors.  This material underwent further
chemical reactions "aided by local sources of heat, water runoff, and
evaporation and/or freezing" and then somehow formed polymers, long
repeating chains of molecules, possibly by aliening themselves on
organized clays (199).  However, this model cannot explain the actual
origin of life because uncertainty about how some of the necessary
subcomponents of life were formed still exists and there is
necessarily even more uncertainty about how the various subcomponents
would then be able to join to form life (199).  Johnson points out
that this model is an entirely naturalistic theory of the origin of
life in that it supposes no need for a Creator because it states that
life arose from nonlife through a series of naturally occurring
phenomena (Johnson1 103).  In this regard, the traditional Christian
and leading scientific views differ fundamentally.
	The first aspect of the primordial soup theory is that the
Earth's early atmosphere was fundamentally different than that of
today's.  This would have been necessary for the origin of life
because the basic components needed to produce life would have reacted
with any available free oxygen and rendered them incapable of
combining with each other (Sullivan 126).  This hypothesis is
supported by the fact that Jupiter and Saturn have much methane and
ammonia in their atmospheres, suggesting that when the solar system
first formed from a nebula of dust and gas, these gases could easily
have made up much of the Earth's atmosphere as well (127-8 and
Goldsmith 181).  Scientific thought has been in disagreement over the
amount of hydrogen available in the early atmosphere.  At first it was
thought that the atmosphere would have contained much free hydrogen
because it is the most prevalent element in the solar system, but
later analysis of Earth's oldest rocks and the inert gases present in
our current atmosphere suggest that the earth never had an atmosphere
that formed along with it from the solar nebula.  It is now thought
that instead the lighter elements that would have formed the
atmosphere joined the earth last and would have included very little
hydrogen because the Earth's gravitational field would not have been
strong enough to capture large amounts of the lightest element
(182-3).  This distinction is important because the famous Miller-Urey
experiment that showed that when energy is added to the supposed
components of the early atmosphere, amino acids are produced, relies
on the assumption that the early atmosphere contained large amounts of
free hydrogen (Johnson1 105).  After this change in popular opinion,
it has subsequently been shown that if there were constant bombardment
of the atmosphere by UV radiation, only a small amount of free
hydrogen would be needed in a primarily carbon dioxide, carbon
monoxide, and nitrogen atmosphere for the synthesis of amino acids and
the cynamide used to link them together (Goldsmith 194).  Thus, it
would still be hypothetically possible to get the building blocks of
life from the less reducing (less free hydrogen) atmosphere that we
now believe the early Earth had.
	Many sources of energy would theoretically have been available
to begin the combinations of molecules that are suspected to have
started life.  Solar UV radiation is the most likely candidate because
in early Earth's supposed atmosphere, UV radiation would have reached
the primordial soup on the surface of the earth easily because no
ozone yet existed to block it (Goldsmith 189).  Other possible energy
sources include lightning, thunder shock waves, the highly
hypothetical use of energy from iron photo- oxidation to synthesize
organic reactions, energy from underwater hydrothermal vents, the also
extremely hypothetical synthesis of organics by the reaction of
dissolved carbon dioxide on pyrite, as well as energy from the
radioactive decay of rocks (189 and Chyba 230-5).  While many of these
sources have not been clearly proven to be of use in the synthesis of
organic material, I believe that if the early earth did in fact have
the kind of atmosphere it was believed to have had, enough varying
energy sources would have been available to cause the synthesis of
some of the basic building blocks of life.
	The final possibility both for the source of energy for the
synthesis of preorganic molecules and for the source of some of the
preorganic molecules (and possibly even for the source of life itself)
is some sort of external delivery to Earth by comets, meteors, or
interstellar dust.  By dating the rocks around the moon's biggest
craters and comparing those dates to the dates of the oldest known
fossils on earth, scientists have concluded that life would have to
have arisen right around the time of the supposed Great Bombardment of
the earth and surrounding planets by comets and meteors around 3.8
billion years ago (Sullivan 131).  It is noted that heavy asteroid
bombardment of the earth would have been harmful to life, vaporizing
rock and blowing away much of the atmosphere, but that when most of
the bombardment was over, the earth could have developed enough of an
atmosphere to slow incoming meteors and allow the intact arrival of
any organic components they may have contained (Goldsmith 195).  Other
scientists believe that it is highly unlikely that any organic
molecules found in meteors would have survived the impact, but note
that collisions of large bodies with the earth would have excited the
atmosphere in such a way as to promote reactions among the elements
already present on earth (Chyba 231).  In April 1997, Vega 1 confirmed
the presence of many organic (carbon-based) molecules in comets, but
did not find any signs of fully developed life (Sullivan 99-100).
This finding suggests that delivery of organic material to Earth from
space was possible, but delivery of fully developed life was
questionable.
	The theory of panspermia, that life came to Earth fully
developed from some source in outerspace, has been generally
discredited by scientists.  The biggest argument against this theory
is that spores traveling through space would be subject to UV, x-ray,
and cosmic ray radiation that would most likely prove lethal to the
life (Goldsmith 188).  In light of this fact, it has been further
proposed that life originated on earth as single- celled organisms
sent out in a protective spacecraft from another civilization to
populate other planets, perhaps because the extraterrestrial
civilization was facing extinction (Sullivan 93-4).  This theory does
not answer the question of the origin of life in general (it just
moves the question to another planet), but it does offer a possible
explanation for the origin of life on earth, and by its very nature
this theory (like the theory of Creation) can never be proven or
disproved.
	Having looked at the various ways in which organic compounds
could have come to be present on ancient Earth, the problem of how
exactly these compounds joined together to form life still remains.
One of the possible theories on how early organic compounds aligned
themselves into more complex forms is that they did so on the surface
of clays.  Clays would have been useful for this purpose because they
have a large surface area, could absorb water and thus concentrate
organic molecules, and have a lattice structure that the organic
molecules could have used as a template for forming themselves into
patterns (Goldsmith 197).  Montmorrilonite is a type of clay shown to
be able to line up adenosine and guanine (essential components of DNA)
and to react with sugars, fatty acids, and amino acids (197).
However, scientists do not agree on the probability of the presence of
this specific type of clay on the early Earth.(Sullivan 134).
Prebiological scientist Cairns-Smith even suggested that clay itself
might have been able to form a kind of preorganic life that then gave
rise to the more efficient organic life of the organic molecules the
clay used in various processes, but this theory is mere speculation
and has never been experimentally confirmed (Johnson1 108-9).
	Thus, scientists have many theories on the possible origin of
the organic molecules that make up life, and have been able to produce
organic compounds from the conditions speculated to have been present
at the time of the origin of life on Earth.  Theories also exist that
attempt to explain how these compounds may have joined together to
form living organisms and extremely preliminary work has been done to
show that these molecules can join together in more complex units that
would be necessary for life, but no experiment has yet succeeded in
producing any compound nearly as complex as the simplest life we now
know.  Many scientists are pessimistic that this will ever be
accomplished for a variety of reasons.  The chief of the National
Academy of Sciences committee to present a 1990 report speculating on
the origin of life has said, "The simplest bacterium is so damn
complicated from the point of view of the chemist that it is almost
impossible to imagine how it happened" (Sullivan 130).  Scientist Fred
Hoyle has said that the chance of life randomly emerging from the
imagined primordial soup is as likely as that "a tornado sweeping
through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials
therein" (Johnson1 106).  Klaus Dose, a researcher in the possible
origins of life, sums up the current standing of that field as of 1988
when he says, "More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of
life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a
better understanding of the immensity of the problem of the origin of
life on Earth rather than to its solution.  At present all discussions
on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in
stalemate or in a confession of ignorance" (Behe 168).  Moreover,
scientists will never be able to determine the exact conditions
present on Earth when life arose, obviously because no one alive today
was there at the time, but also because the methods used to guess the
conditions are necessarily quite uncertain.  Due to the motion of
plate tectonics, the geological record of the Earth's estimated first
1 billion years of existence are no longer available, having been
brought down under the surface of the Earth's crust (Goldsmith 179).
Science therefore makes its guess by analyzing the fossil history
still available and trying to figure out what kind of fossil history
must have preceded that and analyzing the various features of the
other planets to guess how the Earth may have formed (180).  Dating
methods for fossils are necessarily fallible because they involve
analyzing the current isotopes and rate of decay of a sample and then
extrapolating how that sample behaved in the past (Morris 45).  This
method is the most accurate one available, but as Morris mentions, the
rock may not have behaved that way in the past and in the hypothetical
situation that the Earth (and all of its present life forms) had been
created fully mature relatively recently by an outside intelligence,
the Earth and its life would appear to have had a history past the
point at which they were created (41).  Furthermore, if the estimated
dates for the appearance of life on Earth are accurate, life would
have had to come about in a relatively short period of time cosmically
speaking, between 3.8 billion years ago at the end of the Great
Bombardment and 3.5 billion years ago, the estimated age of the oldest
known fossils depicting fully developed life, in this case a type of
algae (Sullivan 131).  The likelihood that life would be able to arise
spontaneously in this amount of time is questionable because, as
evolutionist George Wald notes, "Time is in fact the hero of the
plot.given so much time the `impossible' becomes possible, the
possible probable, and the probable virtually certain.  Time itself
performs miracles" (Morris 41).  Scientists reconcile the need for so
much time for life to come about with the existence of so little time
by noting that obviously life is here and that therefore, "if a
naturalistic process is the only conceivable explanation for its
existence, then the difficulties must not be as insuperable as they
appear" (Johnson1 106).  I find nothing wrong with this logic,
although I believe that in an area of investigation where we can never
know exactly what happened, we should not limit our thinking to only
one possible type of explanation.
	Having discussed the current scientific research into the
possible origin of life on Earth and its successes and failures, I
will now present the Christian viewpoints on this subject.  Christians
are not always in agreement on this question owing to individual
interpretation of the Bible, and the fact that, by its very nature,
the creation story can never be proven or disproved.  Many Christians
see the current scientific ideas about the origin of life on Earth as
fundamentally incompatible with the view of God as a Creator because
these ideas define an entirely natural view of how life arose, without
the need for any divine intervention (Morris 27).  John Morris in his
book The Young Earth is representative of the most extreme Christian
viewpoint.  He believes that the Earth is only a few thousand years
old instead of a few billion and that God created the Earth and its
life in exactly 6 solar days, and he sees this view entirely
accommodated by empirical observations in the natural world because
fossil dating is inherently fallible and because of the nature of the
appearance of a functionally mature creation mentioned earlier (27 -
9).  Other Christians accept current scientific thought as to the age
of the Earth and believe that God created the Earth and its life over
billions of years, citing the fact that the Hebrew word "yom" in
Genesis 1, usually translated as "day", can also mean an indefinite
period of time (27-8).  Morris disagrees with this interpretation,
explaining that whenever yom is preceded by a number or in conjunction
with the words for evening or morning, everywhere else in the Bible it
refers to a literal day (29).  Phillip Johnson, Christian author of
Reason in the Balance, believes that the fact that scientific evidence
strongly suggests against a 6 day creation and a world-wide flood (as
in the story of Noah) need to affect the way Christians interpret the
Bible (Johnson2 109).  He therefore believes that the most important
creation story in the Bible is not the 6 day creation story in Genesis
1, but the spiritual creation story in John 1: "In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in
the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and
without Him not one thing came into being.  (John 1:1-3)" (107).  He
sees this as directly contradicting current scientific theories about
the spontaneous appearance of life on Earth without the aid of the
Creator (108).  Thus, his main concern in interpreting the Bible is
not how God created the Earth and its life, but rather simply that God
created the Earth and its life and that therefore all life has a
purpose and is not simply the result of random combinations of
chemicals in a primordial soup.
	As I mentioned earlier, this latter point of the
purposefulness of life as created by God is the one that I believe
almost all Christians hold no matter what degree of literal
interpretation they apply to the Bible's stories of creation.
Christians see this viewpoint as entirely evidenced by what we know
about life.  Even the evolutionist Cairns-Smith, proposer of the clay
theory for the origin of life, says, "After all what impresses us
about a living thing is its built-in ingenuity, its appearance of
having been designed, thought out-of having been put together with a
purpose." (Johnson1 111-112).  Many Christian thinkers see the view of
life's origin from a Creator as compatible with many parts of common
scientific theory about the origin of life, if not with the main
theory of the random origin of life from a spontaneous combination of
organic materials.  In Darwin's Black Box, Behe uses the metaphor that
some rocks are shaped by erosion and others by a sculptor and still
others by both to explain that God's creative work can be compatible
with the work of natural forces (Behe 229).  This view is essentially
the view that God could have created the Earth and its life according
to a certain design and for a certain purpose, and then set completely
natural "scientifically provable" forces to work on His creation as
planned.
	Thus, after having analyzed both the scientific and Christian
viewpoints about the origin of life on Earth, we are left with the
inescapable conclusion that both viewpoints are theories, neither
provable nor disprovable with our current scientific understanding and
technology, and quite possibly never.  The fact that scientists are no
where close to showing that true life can arise from random chemical
reactions does not prove that it could never happen and that instead
life must have been designed and created by God, but neither does our
ability to produce the components of life in this manner prove that
actual complete life came into being in this manner without the help
of a Creator.  How, then do we choose which one, if either, to
believe?  The alternative option, a combination of the two beliefs, is
in fact feasible to a certain extent.  We can envision a God who set
into motion the universe at the Big Bang according to the laws of
science as we now know them to be and that life on Earth then
developed due to completely natural causes following from God's
original plan.  This is as probable an alternative as the two
extremes.  I personally do not believe that a being so complexly
designed and with such creative capacity for original thought and for
love and hate could have been the eventual product of random reactions
among nonliving molecules.  Since this viewpoint is the inevitable
conclusion of the primordial soup theory, I doubt the validity of that
theory although, because it cannot be verified or disproved, I do not
deny the possibility that life came into being in that way.  I instead
believe that, based upon the seeming inability to prove the method of
life's origin and my personal observations on the infinite complexity
inherent in the design of living beings, especially humans, that life
is in fact the product of intelligent design by a superior Power,
although I make no claims to understand how that creation was
accomplished, nor do I believe that this can ever be known.  Thus I
believe that the question of the origin of life on Earth is a
philosophical, rather than a scientific one, and that people
attempting to formulate their ideas on this subject must be mindful of
the implications of their choice.  If life is merely the result of
random chemical interactions, what is its purpose in the universe?  If
life was specifically designed by a loving God, what then is its
purpose?  These questions I leave to the reader
to answer.  

Works Cited

Behe, Michael J.  Darwin's Black Box.  New York:  THE FREE PRESS, 1996.
Chyba, Christopher F.  "The Origin of Life in the Solar System: Current Issues."                                                                  Annual Review.  1995:  217+.
Goldsmith, Donald and Tobias Owen.  The Search for Life in the Universe.  2nd ed.  
	Reading:  Addison-Wesley, 1992.
Horowitz, Norman H.  To Utopia and Back:  The Search for Life in the Solar System.  
	New York:  W. H. Freeman.
Johnson, Phillip E.  Darwin on Trial.  2nd ed.  Downers Grove:  InterVarsity, 1991.
Johnson, Phillip E.  Reason in the Balance.  Downers Grove:  InterVarsity, 1995.
Morris, John D.  The Young Earth.  Colorado Springs:  Creation-Life, 1994.
Sullivan, Walter.  We Are Not Alone:  The Continuing Search for Extraterrestrial		
	 Intelligence.  Revised ed.  New York:  Plume, 1964.






























The Origin of Life on Earth: Scientific and Christian 
Viewpoints

By Andrea Turpin










FRS 131
Strauss
10/22/97

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