Nagging Problems Explaining Life’s Wonders

In this two-part guest article,
Dr. James O. Smith surveys the
hurdles evolution must leap

Explaining Life’s Wonders, Part I:
A Rapid Survey of Major Nagging Problems

by James O. Smith, M.D.

There is a level of complexity in the Universe that warrants an explanation. Details of living creatures are so complex that human endeavors are insufficient to match them. Man cannot duplicate the life that he observes in abundance around him. This begs the question of how such complexity came to be and how it came to be alive. Either an outside intelligence caused this complexity, or it arose spontaneously through a series of undirected happenstances.

Undirected happenstances generally do not produce functional structures. In nature, there are no examples life being produced by chaotic forces leading onward to life, even with intelligent assistance. The naturalistic answer to this problem is to increase the denominator, basically saying that anything can happen, given enough time. The point seems theoretically valid, although there is no scientific proof that any living organism in the universe was reshaped gradually into a member of another biological family, class or phylum. Nor has science found that blind forces managed to sculpt a genuinely new functional body part.

The Big Picture

So the problem is this: how to explain life as we see it, in its beauty and abundance and complexity. Either God made it, or it made itself. People who do not like the idea that God is the Creator are motivated to produce a naturalistic (no-god-involved) explanation. Simplistically, this can be boiled down to four major transitions to be explained. Of these four transitions, massive and increasing problems are faced by science in testing concepts 1, 2 and 4 by experimental means. Let’s take a look.

1) Nothing to something. The Universe is here and can be studied and felt and observed. It had to come from somewhere. For this first transition, we observe that a universe has come into existence, and we see changes in various ways, but the total content of mass/energy in the universe stays the same. The idea of new universes springing from earlier universes has gained some popularity, but it remains pure speculation. Most embarrassingly, any such birth process seems to entail an extremely high degree of intelligent fine-tuning! On this point we would do well to listen to the pioneering space scientist and Dartmouth professor of physics, Robert Jastrow, who was a self-described agnostic. In his shocking analysis, God and the Astronomers, he argues that our accumulating evidence of a “big bang singularity” has led scientists to confront an embarrassing prospect—the discovery of divine origin of our universe. [i]

2) Nonliving to living. Even if the essential components of life are present, they are incapable of arranging themselves into something alive. If the simplest cell were disassembled, even in the perfect environment, the parts cannot be repositioned into a living cell. As well, intelligently directed attempts to make life have universally failed. Although Miller and Urey succeeded in making a few amino acids, attempts at plausible demonstrations of the successive steps to functional proteins and biological structures have failed. Since their initial publication in 1953, all lines of research that have followed have resulted in an ever more depressing map of a massive and elaborate cul-de-sac. The more we learn, the more a plausible story of abiogenesis seems incredible. So our probing of nature on this topic has not moved science any closer to a plausible pathway to a functioning microbe with DNA, RNA, and the all-important ribosome factories for knitting together proteins.

3) Simple life to complex life. Although the acorn grows into a majestic oak, it does so because it has a written code – DNA – that directs every step along the way. How did the billions of instructions, with their endless thousands of codon words come into being? Either they were written intentionally by God, or they were assimilated unintentionally by a naturalistic, undirected process into the final, functional form. Is this latter notion, relying on “pure, dumb luck,” a plausible creation story?  We will return to this idea shortly.

4) Life to sentient life. The human mind defies explanation. Although neurotransmitters have been named, and the structures in which they function have been described and mapped, it remains a deep mystery as to how thought occurs. Dysfunctional thought is even more fascinating. Mankind is the only creature with the ability to know of his own existence, and the ability to conceive of a creator. Even simpler life demonstrates instinct, a behavior that generates survival in subsequent generations, that is beyond explanation. It can be described and catalogued, but the origin of instinct remains beyond scientific explanation.

From Simple to Complex…How Could It Happen?

Returning to concept three, the transition from simple life to complex life, there remains no empirical evidence that this process has happened or can happen. It would seem reasonable to conclude that if undirected, accidental forces could produce the shocking variety of life observed on our planet, then directed, intelligent could produce at least something. Genetic manipulation is by no means keeping pace with nature in this regard. Dogs can be bred to be slightly different dogs, and organisms with certain features can be shown to predominate in populations, but they remain in the same species from which they began. One cannot shake up a collection of DNA codons and produce a new species or a new tissue or a new body part. The best that can be produced is that which is in nature already. Breeding out a negative trait may be possible, but again this is not creative work, but cleanup.

So this is the crux of pursuing the question of whether life can transition from simple to complex. The standard naturalistic explanation is that random mutation produces new DNA, and subsequently new tissues or body parts form, with subsequent millions of improvements, that ultimately create a new and more complex organism. Natural selection causes the new and improved organisms to dominate their predecessors. Along with this, the capacity to assimilate energy, survive predators, and reproduce must be maintained, at least to some degree.

There are problems with this explanation:

1) It has never been observed in life.

2) It is not evident in the fossil record.

3) It cannot be artificially produced.

Furthermore, there are features in nature as it currently exists that demonstrate why it does not seem to have happened, nor can it happen through intelligent direction. These features are best explained by the description of irreducible complexity.

To illustrate, the Apollo moon missions included essential components, without which transit to the moon and back could not have been accomplished. A rocket to achieve orbit, a module to travel to the moon’s orbit, a landing vehicle, a moon launch vehicle, a module to return to earth orbit, and a capsule capable of withstanding the problems of reentry and achieving a safe landing. Without each of these, the mission of reaching the moon and returning the astronauts alive would have been impossible. Obviously, a great deal of intelligent design went into the structures that accomplished the task.

There are structures in living creatures that are even more complex. The spacecraft had to be built, tested, changed, fuelled, stocked with food and oxygen, and manned with highly trained intelligent beings. There are biological functions that are even more marvellous, and they carry with them the capacity to live, move, assimilate energy from the surrounding environment, grow, adapt, reproduce, and ultimately contribute to the sentient function of making a spacecraft.

These structures commonly exhibit the concept of irreducible complexity. Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe showed this in Darwin’s Black Box and his subsequent three books that elaborated his argument. Some bacteria have an outboard engine-with-propeller called the flagellum which has more than 30 parts, all of which are necessary for assembling and running the apparatus. For a moment, let’s just focus on the structure of the biological motor that powers the flagellum. Its three main structures are made independently, using different sections of the bacterial genome, and the absence of one of the three would be a fatal flaw, just like having a nonfunctional moon launch vehicle would have stranded astronauts on the moon. Is there any way around this roadblock to the gradual development of such structures?

We will take a look at this question in Part Two, and we will then focus on the all important biological puzzle found in our functions involved in breathing, which depend on an intricate process of gas exchange.

[1] At the end of his book God and the Astronomers, having recounted the story of science moving from an “infinitely old universe” to a finite-age universe launched in a singular creation event, Jastrow concludes with these timeless words: “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.”

Note from Editor: This article was back-dated to its intended publication date.