(1) There was just the right atmosphere—and it was totally different from the one we now have.

(2) The ground, water, or ocean where life began had just the right combination of chemicals in it—which it does not now have.

(3) Using an unknown source of just the right amount of energy, amino acids then formed in sufficient quantities that—

(4) they could combine into lots of proteins and nucleotides (complex chemical compounds).

(5) They then reformed themselves into various organs inside a main organism.

(6) They did some careful thinking (as with all the other points, beyond the mental abilities of even our best scientists today), and developed a genetic code to cover thousands of different factors.

(7) At this point, they were ready to start reproducing young. —Of course, this last point reveals that all the previous six had to occur within the lifetime of just one bacterium. Since microbes and bacteria do not live very long, this first one had to think and act fast.

Charles Darwin did a lot of daydreaming in his letters and in his book, Origin of the Species. Here was one of his hopeful wishes, as expressed in a letter to a close friend:

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*Darwin was totally puzzled as to how even one of the plant or animal species could have originated, much less the millions we have today. Yet he wrote a book which, according to the title, explained the problem. An ardent evolutionist refers to the difficulty:

One of the greatest scientists of the last 200 years said this about the possibility of life making itself out of water and mud:

Scientists have tried to analyze what conditions would have had to be like in order for spontaneous generation of life from non-life to occur. They call this the "primitive environment."

The theorists tell us that the first life form developed from nothing about 4.6 billion years ago. But *Steven Jay Gould of Harvard, one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the latter part of the twentieth century, maintains that there would have been very little time for this highly improbable event to have occurred:

*Fred Hoyle wrote in the November 19, 1981 issue of New Scientist, that there are 2000 complex enzymes required for a living organism,—yet not a single one of these could have been formed on earth by shuffling processes in even 20 billion years!

2 - THE ERROR OF LIFE FROM NON-LIFE

In contrast, Biogenesis is the scientific name for the important biological truth confirmed by Louis Pasteur and others, that life can only come from life.

"Biogenesis is a term in biology that is derived from two Greek words meaning life and birth. According to the theory of biogenesis, living things descend only from living things. They cannot develop spontaneously from nonliving materials. Until comparatively recent times,  scientists believed that certain tiny forms of life, such as bacteria, arose spontaneously from non-living substances."—*"Biogenesis," World Book Encyclopedia, p. B-242 (1972 edition).

In the next chapter (chapter 8), we will learn that, in order for life to occur, DNA and protein would have to link up with ease into long, extremely complicated coded strings. In addition, thousands of other complicated chemical combinations would have to be accomplished within a few moments. How long could you live without a beating heart? How long without blood? And on it goes, item after item. The situation would be no different for the simplest of life forms. Everything would have to be in place, suddenly,—instantly. In structure, arrangement, coordination, coding, chemical makeup, feeding, elimination, respiration, circulation, and all the rest,—everything would have to be perfect—right at the start!

The formation of amino acids, protein, DNA, enzymes, and all the rest needed to form the first living creature, had to occur within an extremely short amount of time! It would all have had to occur within far less than a single generation or even half-hour. It would have had to occur within a single moment! Otherwise the next moment the organism would be dead. Millions of functions had to come together all at once.

3 - CHEMICAL COMPOUNDS

About all that most evolutionists offer for the original primitive environment for the first amino acids, proteins, etc., is dirt or seawater. Yet when scientists want to synthesize amino acids, they go to a very well-equipped laboratory, with instruments, gauges, apparatus, chemicals, and machines costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. They use high temperatures, special solutions, sparking devices, and glass traps. They do not go down to the seashore and start sloshing around in seawater in the hope of producing those amino acids.

But the Law of Mass Action would immediately neutralize the procedure and ruin the outcome. This is because chemical reactions always proceed in a direction from highest to lowest concentration (assuming that the exact amount of energy is even present to perform that reaction).

"It is therefore hard to see how polymerization [linking together smaller molecules to form bigger ones] could

We are told that amino acids miraculously formed themselves out of seawater. But the seawater needed to make the amino acids would prevent them from forming into protein, lipids, nucleic acids and polysaccharides! Even if some protein could possibly form, the law of mass action would immediately become operative upon it. The protein would hydrolyze with the abundant water and return back into the original amino acids! Those, in turn, would immediately break down into separate chemicals—and that would be the end of it.

The law of mass action would constitute a hindrance to protein formation in the sea as well as to the successful formation of other life-sustaining compounds, such as lipids, nucleic acids, and polysaccharides. If any could possibly form in water, they would not last long enough to do anything.

This law applies to chemical reactions which are reversible,—and thus to all life compounds. Such reactions proceed from reactant substances to compounds produced in the manner normally expected. But these reactions tend to reverse themselves more easily and quickly (*"Review of R. Shubert-Soldern’s Book, Mechanism and Vitalism," in Discovery, May 1962, p. 44).

Not just a few, but hundreds of thousands of amino acids had to miraculously make themselves out of raw seawater devoid of any life. But the amino acids would separate and break up immediately and not remain in existence long enough to figure out how to form themselves into the complex patterns of DNA and protein. The problem here is that, as soon as the chemical reaction that made the amino acids occurred, the excess water would have had to immediately be removed.

Even if they could survive the other problems, many organic products formed in the ocean would be removed and rendered inactive as precipitates. For example, fatty acids would combine with magnesium or calcium; and arginine (an amino acid), chlorophyll, and porphyrins would be absorbed by clays.

Many of the chemicals would react with other chemicals, to form non-biologically useful products. Sugars and amino acids, for example, are chemically incompatible when brought together.

The chemical compounds within living creatures were meant to be inside them, and not outside. Outside, those compounds are quickly annihilated, if they do not first quickly destroy one another.

Living plants and animals only have certain proportions of the 92 elements within their bodies. These elements are arranged in special chemical compounds. Chemists say they have been reduced. When the chemicals found in living beings are left in the open air, they decompose or, as the chemists say, they oxidize. (A similar process occurs when iron is left in a bucket of water; it rusts.)

In the presence of oxygen, these chemicals leave the reduced (or chemical combination) state and break down to individual chemicals again.

Since most biochemicals contain nitrogen, Gish, a biochemist, has discovered that there never has been enough concentration of nitrogen, in air and water, for amino acids to form by themselves. It does not occur naturally in rich enough concentrations.

Similar studies have been made on the availability of phosphorus by *Bernal. There would not have been enough phosphorus available for the many chemical combinations needed. Phosphorus is needed for DNA and other high-energy compounds. But phosphorus concentrations are too low outside of living things.

Even worse news: *Carl Sagan found that adenosine triphosphate (high-energy phosphate) could not possibly form under the prebiological conditions.

4 - PROTEIN AND OTHER SUBSTANCES

"In the vast majority of processes in which we are interested, the point of equilibrium lies far over toward the side of dissolution. That is to say, spontaneous dissolution [automatic self-destruct process] is much more probable, and hence proceeds much more rapidly, than spontaneous synthesis [accidental put-together process] . . The situation we must face is that of patient Penelope waiting for Odysseus, yet much worse: each night she undid the weaving of the proceeding day, but here a night could readily undo the work of a year or a century."— *G. Wald, "The Origin of Life," in The Physics and Chemistry of Life (1955), p. 17.

In the world of biochemistry, automatic dissolution is always easier than accidental once-in-a-thousand-lifetimes putting-together. Regarding this massive obstacle to the initial formation of life, *Wald says it is "the most stubborn problem that confronts us" (ibid.).

There are also massive DNA and other coding problems. Has any scientist ever synthesized even one new animal code? No, he would have no idea how to accomplish the task successfully. The key word here is "successful." If the researcher could somehow interject one new code he invented, it would only damage the organism. Scientists are now able to slightly adapt existing codes (genetic engineering); but they do not dare invent brand new ones. The list of necessities goes on and on.