The Steps of Creation Part I Chapter 9 – a series of posts taken from the book on the theme of evolution: what it can achieve and what it cannot achieve.
Introduction
The investigation into the origin of life is one of the most speculative areas of science, but it is of the utmost importance to NeoDarwinism. The NeoDarwinist project does not exist without the proposition that life arose by natural means. As we will see, there are enormous difficulties in explaining and demonstrating how this could have been. As scientists enter deeper and deeper into the secrets of life, the gulf between the simplest forms of life and no life manifests itself with greater and greater clarity. Attempts to find a natural explanation for the origin of life have gone on for over half a century now. Some believe that there will be a break-through, and others believe that the problems are insurmountable. And there we have it: it is a question of belief. There is no known law for life to emerge from non-life.
“Was the start of life an accident, or the inevitable outcome of natural laws, or perhaps the deliberate act of a powerful supernatural being?” (Shapiro 1986, page 30).
Did life evolve by chance as a happy one-off accident on a planet called Earth in an immense universe? Is the evolution of life inevitable on inhabitable planets due to some unknown law that causes a rise in the complexity and interconnection of organic molecules? Did God use natural processes to cause life to emerge from matter in the universe? Did God create life by carefully designing its organic components such that they perform functions of amazing intricacy? It is all a matter of belief.
The Principles of Creation 