©2003 by Thomas F. Heinze
Reproduced by permission

The odds are overwhelmingly against life having sprung up by itself with no intelligent source. In the past, atheists used billions of years to somewhat reduce these odds. Here is how one 1979 biology textbook put it:

"The other important requirement for the origin of life is plenty of time. The events necessary for the beginnings of life were extremely unlikely."¹

Back in 1955, Harvard biology professor George Wald had written a famous quote about the beginning of life dramatizing the same idea:

"The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years.… Given so much time the 'impossible' becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles."²

He put abiogenesis in the class of the impossible, but claimed that it happened anyway because that much time could do almost anything.

Walde's statement is not science! It is more like, "Once upon a time." He was grasping at straws! Time only increases the chance of things coming about that can come about. But

• None of the major parts of cells (proteins, DNA, RNA, Lipids) can do that.
• As time passes, all decompose.
• No part will work unless it works with other parts.

This is evidence.

Later evolutionists decided that the huge amounts of time had never really existed. Why? Fossils of ancient bacteria were found which, according to evolutionary dates, lived 3.55 billion years ago, only a half billion years after evolutionists believe the earth had cooled down enough to support life. These fossils, "… look identical to bacteria still on Earth today."³ Today's evolutionists say that this left very little time for a first primitive life to form and then evolve enough to look identical to modern bacteria.

De Duve, a Nobel scientist wrote of these fossils:

"Advanced forms of life existed on earth at least 3.55 billion years ago.…It is now generally agreed that if life arose spontaneously by natural processes…it must have arisen fairly quickly, more in a matter of millennia or centuries, perhaps even less, than in millions of years."⁴

Even those like De Duve who believe in an old earth realize there was not enough time. There was no time for chance to form proteins. No time for RNA to form. No time for natural selection to perfect RNA. No time for RNA to make proteins. No time for information to accumulate gradually had information not required a mind. No billions of years. No millions of years. No time!

The odds are so overwhelmingly against each step in the spontaneous generation of life that in the past, even atheists freely admitted that life could not have formed without huge amounts of time. Today most of them admit that the billions of years never existed. Now they simply state, "Life must have formed rapidly."

If it did, it should be easy to duplicate in the lab. The fact that no one can is evidence.

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