THE THEORY
Most of us have been told for decades that the Miller experiments proved how life originated in that primordial soup (you know –Darwin’s favorite food). In the 1950s Stanley Miller, Harold Urey and a team experimented on the elements that “must have” existed in abundance on the early earth, (Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Hydrogen, and then later on Hydrogen Sulfide), by zapping them and their compounds with electricity. Of course, lightning had to be involved in the creation of life, as even Frankenstein himself knew, well before Miller came along (!) That’s strange: I always thought electricity and lightning destroyed life…
Miller and the boys produced some amino acids, some of the chemical building blocks of life. While many believed that they actually produced life in a test tube (when it had allegedly taken nature many millions of years), they were in fact no nearer to producing life than you would be to producing a space shuttle if you managed to extract or produce some plastics, ceramics, copper, glass, steel, and so on. Even then, the space shuttle can’t reproduce its own kind.
A few years ago, Jeffrey Bada, a biochemist in California inherited the very vials that Miller had used, and began to conduct more experiments on the residue, enthusing that he had found more amino acids in trace amounts. They in fact found a total of 23 amino acids, ten of which are found in life. Bada and a team continue to work on these experiments, in the hope of finding more clues to the origin of the first life on earth.
http://www.icr.org/article/historic-primordial-soup-study-yields/
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=33160
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2011/03/26/news-to-note-03262011
It struck me that for decades millions of people have been convinced by school text books and television documentaries (and not any visible evidence) that Miller had virtually given birth, “proving” that we all crawled out of the soup via fish-like, lemur-like and ape-like creatures.
THE TRUTH
I’ve reviewed Ben Stein’s movie “Expelled” before, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is really seeking some truth. In Expelled, released October 2008, Stein exposes some of the strong arm tactics being employed to shut out of science, education and the media not only anyone who may believe in a Creator, but anyone interested in Intelligent Design (the search for design in nature without putting God into the equation), or even anyone who wants to question the Darwinian explanation of evolution.
I want to draw your attention to one of the most striking parts of the movie. The layman can easily miss the significance of it, and I missed most of it on my first viewing.
Towards the end of the movie, Stein interviews the great Richard Dawkins, and gives us all a fabulous glimpse into the mind of one of the world’s leading evolutionists. Dawkins begins by reading from his book “The God Delusion”, and proceeds to call the Judeo-Christian God (not Allah, of course) all the names you wouldn’t dare call Adolph Hitler or Idi Amin, even now.
Stein asks Prof. Dawkins (for all of us to see and hear) how the process of the origin of life started.
Prof. Dawkins: “Nobody knows how it started…we know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life”.
Stein: “What was that?”
Prof. Dawkins: “It was the… origin of the first self-replicating molecule.”
(Wait a minute, I thought, we have just made a leap from nothing but soup to the first self-replicating molecule).
The conversation continued…
Stein: “Right. And how did that happen?”
Prof. Dawkins: “I’ve told you, we don’t know”
Stein: “So you have no idea how it started?”
Dawkins: “No, no, nor has anybody.”
Prof Dawkins then goes on to suggest that some remote and highly evolved civilization out there in space may have “designed a form of life which they then seeded onto perhaps this planet”.
So here, a man who doggedly resists Creationism and Intelligent Design, and who says that the evidence for evolution is “totally overwhelming”, is offering his speculation (and not evidence) that life on earth may have been “designed” and “seeded”. He is also admitting that apart from this neither he, nor anyone else, knows how life began.
If it had indeed been “proven” that life evolved in the soup, as hundreds of millions of people have been led to believe, then Prof. Dawkins would not be giving such answers: he would be trumpeting the results.
“Expelled” is a must see movie for the seeker. I’m told that a few atheists will give such productions a one-star rating in order to lower the overall rating as much as possible, so don’t be put off: the low cost of the movie is fantastic value, if only to see the interview.
Fuel for Faith 