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Miracle Of Life


Miracle of Life

So, I'm going to look at this "miracle of life" one more time...

Could life evolve randomly from inorganic matter? Not according to mathematicians.

    In the last 30 years a number of prominent scientists have attempted to calculate the odds that a free-living, single-celled organism, such as a bacterium, might result by the chance combining of pre-existent building blocks. Harold Morowitz calculated the odds as one chance in 10100,000,000,000. Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the odds of only the proteins of an amoebae arising by chance as one chance in 1040,000.

    ...the odds calculated by Morowitz and Hoyle are staggering. The odds led Fred Hoyle to state that the probability of spontaneous generation 'is about the same as the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard could assemble a Boeing 747 from the contents therein.' Mathematicians tell us that any event with an improbability greater than one chance in 1050 is in the realm of metaphysics -- i.e. a miracle.1
Harold Marowitz, an atheist physicist, created mathematical models by imagining broths of living bacteria that were superheated until all the complex chemicals were broken down into basic building blocks. After cooling the mixtures, Marowitz used physics calculations to conclude that the odds of a single bacterium reassembling by chance is one in 10100,000,000,000. 2 Wow! How can I grasp such a large statistic? Well, it's more likely that I would win the state lottery every week for a million years by purchasing just one ticket each week.

In response to the probabilities calculated by Marowitz, Robert Shapiro, author of Origins - A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, wrote:

    The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle.3
Sir Fred Hoyle compared the probability of life arising by chance to lining up 1050 (ten with fifty zeros after it) blind people, giving each one a scrambled Rubik's Cube, and finding that they all solve the cube at the same moment.

Regarding the origin of life, Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize in biology for his work with the DNA molecule, stated in 1982:

    An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. 4


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Footnotes:
1 Mark Eastman, MD, Creation by Design, T.W.F.T. Publishers, 1996, 21-22.
2 Eastman and Missler, The Creator Beyond Time and Space, 76-77.
3 Robert Shapiro, Origins -- A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, 1986, 128.
4 Francis Crick, Life Itself -- Its Origin and Nature, Futura, 1982.

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