Why Abiogenesis and The Miller-Urey Experiment Failed

If an intelligent being was behind the creation of the universe, then we can suggest that the God of the Bible was the one who did it. How? By the specific details in which He did it.

For example, if I see a car I can safely assume that it was intelligently designed. But the characteristics of that car will give me the strongest evidence of who made it. If it has the Ford logo in the front and back, I can assume that Ford was the one who made it, and Chevrolet didn’t. If the Bible says that the Earth was created a certain way and the Koran says differently, but we see that the evidence matches up closer to the Bible, then we can assume that the Bible is right. But the thing is, that the evidence doesn’t just match up closer to the Bible, they tell the same story.

Alright, did life arise slowly? Or was it created in an instant? To find the answer, we must first answer the question, “What does life need to begin?” Abiogenesis is believed to have occurred in the probiotic chemical soup that spontaneously created amino acids. This has been claimed to have been demonstrated by Harold Urey and Stanley Miller. The experiment they performed is known as ‘The Miller Experiment’. However, there were many complications with this experiment. For one, half of the amino acids created were right-handed. And amino acids are supposed to be left-handed to successfully create life. And there is no mechanism to sift out, or ‘select’ the right-handed amino acids out of the left-handed amino acids. But we’ll give them the amino acids because that’s not even the biggest problem they have. The next challenge for them and the second thing that life needs to begin is protein molecules. How? The amino acids must create protein molecules. But there is no known mechanism for this. But Murray Eden, a professor at Massachusetts Institution of Technology said that such an event would be expected to happen once every billion years. Looks good for the evolutionists, right? Not. Because why don’t we see life spontaneously appearing in our oceans today? Why? The evolutionists would say, ‘Because conditions were just right’. So that brings a new question. For how long were conditions ‘just right’ because that’s how long they have.

It must’ve happened between two events, the appearing of the Earth's oceans (approx. 3.8 billion years ago), and the appearance of the first microfossils (approx. 3.2 billion years ago). That’s approximately 600 million years. Now that’s the high end. We don’t know how long it would’ve taken the oceans to create the ‘just right’ mixtures in the probiotic soup for the amino acids to be created. Not only does this make abiogenesis highly unlikely, but if you study a little closer, it makes it impossible! In 1979 two geologists in Greenland found cell-like structures in some of the oldest rocks in the world, dated at around 3.8 billion years old. They named it Isophera. In 1980 C. Walters and two others examined the organism and stated, “We have now what we believe is strong evidence for life on Earth 3.8 Billion Years ago”. Manfred Schedlowski in 1988 wrote an article in Nature interpreting the carbon isotopes he found in the fossil saying that the particular isotopes he found could have only been created by biological matter. Gustaf Arrhenius, a highly respected scientist also found carbon isotopes in the rocks isophera was found in, including carbon 12. At the end of the analysis that stretched for 9 years, most of the scientists involved were convinced that there were signs of life 3.8 billion years ago. But that’s when the oceans formed. So did life immediately get started after the oceans formed without the need for probiotic soup? That is probabilistically impossible or at least extremely unlikely. Richard Milton pointed out this argument in his book “Shattering the Myths of Darwinism” and said, 

“Life, it seems, did not wait for blind chance to roll the dice, but erupted at the first available instant, leaving Darwinists with no time at all for their probabilistic processes.” 

This is one of the most damning proofs against the Abiogenesis Hypothesis, and in support of the intelligent design theory. The hypothesis of Abiogenesis has tons of holes in it, these holes are made by simple, unanswerable questions such as How could naturalistic processes create 100% left-handed Amino Acids? What naturalistic mechanism is there to separate left-handed Amino Acids from right-handed? Why are the oldest signs of life found at the forming of the Earth’s oceans? etc.

“And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”

Genesis 1:20 

There’s no doubt that the first life arose out of the water, but it would’ve been impossible without another force interacting with the material. That is explained by the Creator of the Universe, God himself.

“Strictly speaking, Darwinism is not concerned with abiogenesis the appearance of life from inanimate matter-but only with the subsequent evolution of those primitive organisms into more highly developed species. In practice, however, Darwinism is intimately related to theories of abiogenesis. Darwin himself famously speculated in private correspondence about life coming into being spontaneously in some primitive warm pool.” 

-Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism