The Turkish journal Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology) carried a report headed “Was Life Inevitable?” in its December 2006 issue. The report concerned a new claim about the so-called spontaneous generation of life. The noteworthy thing in the article, however, was the judgmental crisis of the researchers concerned, rather than the claim itself, which was devoid of any scientific evidence. Let us examine this crisis, which can be seen to stem from a blind devotion to materialism.

The Turkish journal Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology) carried a report headed “Was Life Inevitable?” in its December 2006 issue. The report concerned a new claim about the so-called spontaneous generation of life. The noteworthy thing in the article, however, was the judgmental crisis of the researchers concerned, rather than the claim itself, which was devoid of any scientific evidence. Let us examine this crisis, which can be seen to stem from a blind devotion to materialism.

Harold Morowitz, a biologist from George Mason University, and Eric Smith, a physicist from the Santa Fe Institute, suggest that the supposed spontaneous beginning of life might have been the natural and inevitable result of the buildup of energy that took place with the geological processes that dominated in the early stages of the Earth.

The geological processes that dominated in the early stages of the Earth…

A natural and inevitable result of the buildup of energy…

A truly enormous fairy tale lies concealed within these two groups of words. This tale, which contains infinite imagination, is an unscientific one developed due to the need to provide an explanation for life compatible with materialist dogma.

It immediately needs to be made clear that there is no geological process in nature capable of turning inanimate matter into a living cell. For example, no life form emerged spontaneously through tectonic movements such as earthquakes, or volcanic effects, or forces such as wind and rain that shape the Earth.

In addition, trying to give the impression that life can be explained in terms of geological processes is ridiculous. Because the living cell does not consist of a mass formed by molecules rolled together. As well as exhibiting an extraordinary organization, life also possesses the attribute of being irreducible to structural formation. This attribute is the fact that life is based on genetic information. Since information and matter are two entirely separate spheres, the origins of their presence in the living cell need to be investigated separately.

George C. Williams, one of the leading proponents of the theory of evolution, admits this fact that the majority of materialists and evolutionists are unwilling to see:

Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter… These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term “reductionism”… The gene is a package of information, not an object… In biology, when you"re talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you"re talking about information, not physical objective reality… This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms. (George C. Williams, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution [ed. John Brockman], New York, Simon and Schuster, 1995, pp. 42-43)

It is clear that the Bilim ve Teknik article entirely ignores this difficulty. The researchers’ claim, which is equivalent to saying “however it might have happened, molecules in some way came together under the effect of various geological forces, and gave rise to the living cell,” is the product of an exceedingly superficial perspective that is quite unable to account for the information at the basis of life. There can be no doubt that it provides no valid explanation for the theory that life began spontaneously.

Invalidity of the lightening example

The unrealistic and superficial perspective of evolutionists is revealed in an example given in the article. The article interprets the supposed spontaneous generation of life as perhaps being the result of an energy release “similar to a lightning bolt, the discharge of the electricity collected in clouds.” The fact is, however, that no valid resemblance can be constructed between the energy release in lightning and the supposed spontaneous generation. As stated in the article, lightning is merely related to the discharge of energy, while life is based on “organization,” an exceedingly conscious functioning exhibiting extraordinary complexity. The molecular biologist Michael Denton describes this glorious organization by comparing it to a giant metropolis:

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity… 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… (Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, London: Burnett Books, 1985, p. 242)

Lightning bolts striking the molecules covering the world could obviously not give rise to such an organized complexity. To draw an analogy regarding the chances of life emerging spontaneously through lightning we need to look at the calculations of the famous astronomer and mathematician Sir Fred Hoyle. Despite being a materialist himself, Hoyle stated that the possibility of a living cell appearing on Earth by chance was equivalent to the possibility that tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein. (“Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, Vol. 294, 12 November 1981, p. 105)

In short, the claim that energy discharges caused by natural phenomena such as lightning could turn inanimate matter into a living cell is mathematically impossible and invalid. Furthermore, the claim in Bilim ve Teknik that life emerged “inevitably” through such energy discharges implies the total abandonment of reason and science.

The researchers’ admission 

In fact, the researchers themselves admit that the claim in Bilim ve Teknik magazine goes no further than being fantastical conjecture. The following words appear in the article, which also states that this claim violates the second law of thermodynamics:

The researchers admit that there is a need for greater theoretical means to prove their views… Since the second law of thermodynamics states that universe as a whole produces ever greater disorder, the question of how the biochemical processes that function in an exceedingly ordered and regular manner in living things could have come into being spontaneously is one that scientists have been asking for a long time.

Evolutionists’ (lack of) scientific understanding 

The nonsensical nature of evolutionists’ scientific understanding in the above extract is most striking. As stated in the article, the second law of thermodynamics states that universe as a whole produces ever greater disorder. The second law of thermodynamics, one of the most basic laws of physics, is based on a very large number of observations and experiments. Accordingly, the idea that such an organized complexity as life developed gradually from simpler molecular structures is one that has been definitively proven to be a violation of science.

Evolutionists, however, ignore this well-known law of science. Instead, they hypothesize that imaginary laws of nature came into existence in the most primeval ages in the Earth’s history and thanks to these, in some unknown way, life emerged spontaneously. With this scenario, developed solely in the light of materialist assumptions, they have shown how they prefer dogma to science.

The presence of such an unscientific understanding in a publication from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), an official Turkish state body, is most thought-provoking. We hope that the journal’s editors will rectify this grave error and will in future editions adopt an understanding in which science is liberated from materialist dogma.