Why I am a Christian (4)

The Unlikely Story of the Appearance of Life on Earth Points to an Author

In 2012, I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I came up with 26.

The first four reasons (to do with the origins of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, the life-favouring properties of the Earth and the improbable appearance of organic matter on Earth) contribute to my understanding as to why I think that my belief in a creator is credible and not unreasonable. 

So this is the fourth of 26 reasons I am a Christian; the unlikely story of the appearance of life on Earth points to an author.

To sum up where we have got to so far, pause to consider these things if you will: (1) The unexplained and instantaneous appearance of everything there is, with no raw materials to work from, at the beginning of time. (2) The mind-bogglingly precise physics necessary for anything and everything to continue existing. (3) The amazingly exact coincidences of everything being perfectly calibrated on earth to support flourishing life. And (4) the staggeringly complex feat of getting dead matter -completely unassisted- to become complex, self-multiplying organisms. If that doesn’t make you wonder, then maybe you should wonder why.

In short, to embrace naturalism (the belief that nature is all there is and there is no spiritual realm and no possibility of a supernatural being) you have to defend, with explanations, a belief that:

•   Nothing just produced everything

•   Chaos just produced precision fine-tuning

•   Non-life just produced life

•   Unconsciousness just produced consciousness

Could even the simplest life forms have come into existence, all by themselves, from inanimate -dead- components? And if so, how did they do it? 

(And incidentally, if life could and did just materialize from dead matter why is the resurrection of Christ so far-fetched? But let’s not get into Reason 14 just yet).

How life was ever assembled from non-life is the biggest conundrum in biology. It made the staunchly atheist philosopher Anthony Flew think the unthinkable. “It has become inordinately difficult to even to begin to think about a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism” he confessed. Flew ended up abandoning atheism altogether and writing a book called There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

The problem that unsettled Flew’s curious mind is summed up well by Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School Jack W. Szostak and biochemist Dr. Alonso Ricardo: “It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines, which are mostly protein-based catalysts called enzymes, could have formed spontaneously as life first arose from nonliving matter around 3.7 billion years ago. To be sure, under the right conditions some building blocks of proteins, the amino acids, form easily from simpler chemicals, as Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey of the University of Chicago discovered in pioneering experiments in the 1950s. But going from there to proteins and enzymes is a different matter.”

Proteins and enzymes and DNA are exceptionally complex molecules that just do not self-create any more than laptop computers self-assemble or pullovers self-knit. Flew admitted that it was folly to keep pretending that they do.

Biochemists have tried simulating the creation of life from non-life with the most advanced experiments in high-tech laboratories and they cannot get anywhere near it. 

If our most intelligent minds cannot pull it off in the most sophisticated conditions, should we not be sceptical when we are told that it just managed all by itself on a messy and primitive Earth?

Geneticist Dr. Michael Denton, who describes himself as an agnostic, explains why we should not be surprised that this quest to replicate the creation of life has always ended in disappointment. “Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive. Even the tiniest of bacterial cells is a veritable micro-miniaturised factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of 100 thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.”

No wonder fair-minded atheists like Anthony Flew and others, who have the courage to follow where the evidence leads, have found all this so troublesome to their prior assumptions. 

Honest sceptics know full well that they cannot say that the appearance of living organisms points to the non-existence of God. On the contrary, when they look at the evidence objectively, some reluctantly concede that the case for some kind of creator is overwhelming.

Personally, I think the notion of a wise, all-powerful God is as reasonable as anything else that has been suggested. It fits with the facts of our inexplicably well calibrated universe and with God’s self-revelation in the Bible where he is referred to as “the Author of Life" (Acts 3.15).

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth… he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.” Acts 17.24-25.

To sum up, here’s the deal: twenty different amino acids are involved in producing proteins and each amino acid has to be arranged, often duplicated, in precisely the right place in the molecule to form the protein.

Oxford Professor of Mathematics John Lennox, in God’s Undertaker, spells out the overwhelmingly improbable scenario necessary for that to occur. “If we had a pool consisting of all twenty [amino acids] the probability of getting the correct amino acid at a specific site in the protein would be 1/20. Thus the probability of getting 100 amino acids in the correct order would be (1/20) to the power of 100, which is 1 in 10 with 130 zeros after it. But this is just the start… For these calculations concern only a single protein. Yet life as we know it requires hundreds of thousands of proteins, and it has been calculated that the odds against producing these by chance is more than 10 with 40,000 zeros after it to 1.”

I take this as compelling supporting evidence against blind chance as a satisfactory explanation for the origins of life on Earth.

At this point, some will be asking themselves “What about evolution then?”

This series is about why I am a Christian, so I am focusing more on advancing positive arguments about why I think Christianity is true than on answering objections from others who think it is false.

But this particular issue is so important and is such a stumbling block to belief in God for so many. I can hardly avoid addressing it before I leave my reflections from the world of science and move on to more philosophical ground.

I have looked at evidence from the fossil record, from genetic research, from biogeography etc. with an open mind and followed where it leads. It seems very highly likely that species are related to each other and have undergone modification over great periods of time. I know there are Christians who disagree. I respect them and, who knows, it may be that they end up being right, but I don’t think so. The evidence for an ancient universe and natural selection is compelling and as a Christian I say that without embarrassment.

It is regrettable that the debate about our origins has become so polarised and reductionist in some circles. It is as if there are only two choices available to us; we must accept that we are the result of a random, godless accident in a meaningless universe or we must sign up to an ultra-literal six 24-hour day, young-earth scenario.

In fact, most (not all but most) Christians I know accept that there has been descent with modification in living species without any erosion whatsoever of their belief in the Bible as the inspired word of God.

The narrative of divine direction of natural processes is entirely coherent. In much the same way, when Christians marvel at God’s handiwork after a baby is born, they do not deny that it required sexual intercourse between the child’s mother and father as well. Nor do they see the parents’ role as an argument against the existence of God.

David Robertson in his book The Dawkins Letters lists Asa Gray (botanist), Charles Walcott (palaeontologist), Theodosius Dobzhansky (evolutionary biologist), RJ Berry (geneticist), Owen Gingerich (scientific historian) and Francis Collins (Head of the Human Genome Project) as but a few examples of internationally distinguished scientists who are also Christian believers. There are many more of course. Christians in Science has over 1,000 members including senior scientists engaged in research and development, university lecturers and scientific writers. The idea that science and faith are incompatible is simply false. (Incidentally the popular notion of an overwhelming rejection of Darwin’s Origin of Species from the church in the 19^th Century is an urban myth as has been pointed out on the TV show QI).

As has often been said, science asks “how”. The Bible explores “why.” We get ourselves into hot water when we force science to explain “why” and misinterpret the Bible as a book that was written primarily to tell us “how it all happened down to every last detail.”

How do I read the Bible then on questions related to scientific enquiry?

I acknowledge the nuances of ancient Hebrew literary genre and I interpret Genesis with due attention to its context. Most Christians I know do the same. That does not at all interfere with my belief that it is truth revealed by God. I see Genesis 1 as theological truth (telling me things about God) and presented in the genre of a story.

Consider this comparison: Julius Caesar existed. Shakespeare’s brilliant play about his life is a broadly accurate depiction of the great turning points of his life. But no one would claim that the object of the play is to reproduce verbatim the historical dialogue between Caesar, Brutus and Mark Antony. 

Critics who would reject the play because some of its verbal exchanges may not be absolutely factual miss the point. Shakespeare’s genius and inspiration is to bring out themes like power, free will, fate, loyalty and betrayal for us to reflect on through the framework of real history. 

I see Genesis 1 in a broadly similar way. Genesis tells me about God’s ex-nihilo creative power, his careful ordering of the universe, his wise authorship of life on earth and the special place humankind has in his creative plan - unique over all other animal life. Bringing everything that exists into being was effortless for God. As we might say, "Oh, it was all in a week's work to me."

In short, Genesis 1 is a beautiful and inspirational artist’s impression that explains the divine reason why everything is as it is, and who is behind it - in language a child can understand.

Who knows, the theory of evolution may one day be demonstrated to be fatally flawed but I think, at the present time, it offers the best explanation of the mechanics of natural history we have.

But it absolutely does not explain everything. One step back from natural selection (which I accept), evolution fails to account for the origin of life itself which is the main point I have tried to make above.

Bill Bryson writes: “It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake – but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life.”

Natural selection doesn’t even begin to explain how or why there is anything to select in the first place!

And what of the great chasm that exists between human beings and all other animals? True, 97% of our DNA is identical to a chimpanzee’s but we share 60% of a fruit fly’s DNA too!

In fact, similar percentages may be observed between different models of car made by the same manufacturer. That doesn't mean that the differences must have occurred by themselves. No one denies that the differences are due to design. Manifestly, they are.

And that 3% that distinguishes us from our nearest genetic cousin... Our consciousness, our search for meaning, our appreciation of art and beauty and greatness, our facility for love, our yearning for the divine, our capacity for selfless philanthropy and noble self-sacrifice, our intelligence that has propelled us to the moon, our ability to reason, to feel shame, to smile and laugh and hope… 

I believe all these point to the Image of God in us, which is what I will start to write about in two weeks’ time.