The Origin of Life

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, you’ve been reading up on origin of life issues lately. Always interesting. What led to your research in this?

DR. CRAIG: As you know, I am writing a systematic philosophical theology. I’ve reached the section on the doctrine of creation – one of the most important loci or themes of systematic theology. My vision of systematic theology is that it should be integrative with what we learn from secular disciplines about the world. So I want a doctrine of creation that is scientifically informed and compatible with what we learn through the study of the natural world through the sciences. This naturally raises the question of the origin of life on this planet. Where did life come from, and what was God's role in the origin of life? That is what has plunged me into this very unfamiliar and different realm of research that I'm presently engaged in.

KEVIN HARRIS: I understand the study of life's origins involves the study of abiogenesis. Am I correct on that? And how would we define that?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Abiogenesis can be differently defined. Basically it's the idea that life is not eternal in the past but that at some point in the past there were no living organisms – no living things. Then later there arose living things so that life came from and after non-life. Now, the key element is whether or not abiogenesis by definition means the natural origin of life from non-life, or does it simply mean the origin of life from non-life? The reason that's important is that even the creationist who believes that at some point in the past on a lifeless Earth God created the first life. In a neutral sense, that is abiogenesis – life comes after and from non-life. But it doesn't do so naturally. It comes through a creative miracle of God. I don't think there's any right or wrong way to define abiogenesis. We just need to make ourselves very clear about how we're using the term. In the neutral sense, I think, as Christians, we are committed to abiogenesis because we do not believe that life is eternal in the past but did arise at some point. But we're not committed to the view that life arose naturally from non-life with no supernatural input from God. That is a disputed question. So in my work I'm using the word “abiogenesis” in the neutral sense to simply mean the origin of life from non-life.

KEVIN HARRIS: You've mentioned meeting Dr. James Tour down at Rice University. He is very adamant that scientists don't have a clue how life started and that anyone who claims they know the scientific mechanisms of how life started is full of hot air. He quotes another scientist, Dr. Steve Benner, who says that skilled chemists are doing amazing things in the lab in the research of life's origins but Benner says it's precisely because of the complexity of this chemistry it cannot possibly account for how life actually originated on Earth. I thought that was interesting.

DR. CRAIG: I think that's a very important conclusion. And Tour is not alone in that conclusion. Tour is not arguing for intelligent design or for the existence of God. His conclusion is actually a very modest one – that we do not know how life originated on this planet. He says we know that at some point in the past life did not exist, at a later point it did, but he said we don't really understand how we got from point A to point B. It's just a confession of ignorance. Now, he's not alone in saying this. For example, one of the books that I read is by Pier Luigi Luisi called The Emergence of Life, a major text on this subject. Let me read you what he says. He writes,

Some authors talk about origin of life at the level of the origin of low molecular weight compounds, obtainable either through hypothermal vents; or the pyrite reaction; or by [Stanley] Miller’s type of processes. However, you can have all low molecular weight compounds of this world, and you will never be able to make life, as life only arises at the level of specific macromolecular sequences like enzymes, DNA, RNA. . . . I will insist on that, because it is one of the unanswered questions (how to make them) and because it is a question that is not taken seriously enough in the literature.

So Luisi is saying we don't really know how these essential building blocks of life like RNA, DNA, and protein came into existence. Similarly, in a book by Harold Morowitz (one of the most eminent origin of life researchers) and his co-author Eric Smith, they say, “We currently have essentially no understanding of what laboratory conditions would reproduce the emergence of life.” Well, that's not different from what Tour says (in perhaps just a more colorful way) that we're clueless as to the origin of life. So contrary to the popular impression that's often given in high school biology books and in the popular culture, contemporary science does not have any understanding about how we got from point A to B and how life originated on this planet.

KEVIN HARRIS: What are some of the schools of thought in origin of life research?

DR. CRAIG: One of the things that I noticed that is so interesting is that these origin of life researchers tend to fall into two different camps that can be called “necessitism” or “contingentism.” Necessitists believe that the origin of life is the inevitable byproduct of the laws of physics and chemistry – that it is necessary in a universe governed by these natural laws that life will originate. It's unavoidable. It's fully explicable in terms of these natural laws. That's necessitism. Contingentists, on the other hand, say life is not written into the natural laws of this universe. You could have these natural laws in place and life might never originate anywhere in the cosmos. Instead, they emphasize that the existence of life depends upon an enormously improbable conspiracy of initial conditions – just the right conditions for life to originate. They admit that the origin of life is enormously improbable, just probably hasn't happened anywhere else in the observable universe than on this planet. So those would be the two schools of thought – necessitism and contingentism. I think that this helps to explain why you so often see these overly confident statements by certain scientists in the press where they say things like “the origin of life was inevitable,” “it had to come about,” “these were chemical reactions that could not have failed to happen; they had to happen.” That's an expression of necessitism. But necessitism is the minority position today. Most origin of life researchers would be contingentists who recognize that the origin of life depends upon this incredibly improbable conspiracy of initial conditions. Now, here's what's really fascinating to me as a theist. Both of these camps accuse the other of having ulterior theological motives. The contingentists accused the necessitists of thinking that God has somehow written life into the very structure of the universe so that it was inevitable that life will arise. God has created the universe so that it will produce life. So these necessitists are really closet theists who are claiming that God has created the universe in such a way as to make life necessary. On the other hand, the necessitists accuse the contingentists of believing that the origin of life is essentially a miracle! It's so improbable that it's miraculous; it's nothing short of a miracle. Therefore these contingentists are really theists who believe that the origin of life on Earth is a miracle wrought by God. So, as a theist who does take an explicitly theological position, I look at this debate with some amusement as I see both camps accusing the other of having ulterior theological motives which to these naturalists or secularists is the ultimate insult – the ultimate objection – to be appealing to God. I find that just a fascinating aspect of the contemporary debate among these secular theorists.

KEVIN HARRIS: Obviously, we'd like to know what the biblical data are on this topic. So let's go over some of it.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. What are we committed to as Christians with respect to the origin of life? As you read the creation story in Genesis 1, it's evident that God is not only the creator of the universe but also the creator of life. The primordial condition of the early Earth described in Genesis 1 is a lifeless Earth. It is a primordial sea that is described by the author in the Hebrew as tohu wa-bohu which means an uninhabitable waste. Then, over the next few days, it describes how God transforms this uninhabitable waste into a living biosphere. He creates the sea creatures, the vegetation on the land, the animals, and then finally, as the climax of his creative work, he creates man. So from a biblical point of view, physical life as well as spiritual life ultimately originates with God. In the discussions of abiogenesis, we are concerned exclusively with the origin of physical life. And that's important, too, because according to the Bible life is not just physical. God, angels, the soul – all of these are spiritual entities, and they are alive. This is a sort of non-physical life that exists in addition to physical life, and God is also the source of this non-physical life. One is tempted to call this spiritual life, but the problem with that is that in the Bible “spiritual life” is described in terms of a saving relationship with God. A relationship in which one experiences redemption, grace, and forgiveness. So a person can be spiritually dead and yet still be alive in a non-physical sense. The souls of those who are separated from God relationally are still alive. I don't know any other better term for this kind of life than to call it non-physical life in contrast to physical life. What the biblically committed Christian or Jew believes is that God is alive in a non-physical way, that is to say, he is a self-conscious, active, free, moral agent who does things. He is non-physically alive, and he has created then physical life on this planet. So God is ultimately the source of both non-physical and physical life. Those are our theological commitments. The question will then be: How do we best integrate such a theological perspective with the scientific data concerning abiogenesis. This is not an argument for the existence of God. We begin with a theological perspective. We begin with the position that God is the ultimate source of all non-physical and physical life. But then we try to ask the question: How is this theological perspective best integrated with what we learn about the origin of life from contemporary science?

KEVIN HARRIS: As you pointed out, we even see in all the debating going back and forth from all the camps that it is hard to escape the theological ramifications of all this. What are some theological perspectives?

DR. CRAIG: I can think of three theological perspectives on this debate. First, if you're a necessitist and you believe that life is written into the very laws of nature so that life is inevitable then it would seem to me that the Christian would say that God has created the universe to operate according to certain natural laws that would necessarily produce life. So God is ultimately the source of life on Earth, but he brings it about by establishing in the beginning these physical and chemical laws that make the origin of life ultimately necessary and inevitable. This would be a view that we might call theistic evolution – that God is the source ultimately of life but he chose to bring it about through an evolutionary process. That would be the necessitist view from a theology perspective. If you're a contingentist and you think that the origin of life is not written into the structure of the universe but is based upon highly improbable initial conditions, it seems to me that there are two perspectives that the Christian might take. One would be to say that the origin of life is due to God's miraculous intervention in the sequence of secondary physical causes in the world to bring about something that those causes, if left alone, would not have brought about. This perspective we could call creationism. Creationism would attribute the origin of life to God's supernatural and miraculous intervention in the sequence of natural events to bring about the origin of life. I think that the most plausible account of creationism would be some kind of progressive creationism where God intervenes periodically to bring about the new and the different that wouldn't have resulted from the secondary causes alone rather than a sort of Young Earth Creationism which would have God doing it in the first literally six 24-hour periods of time. On the other hand, we can imagine a version of contingentism that would not appeal to miraculous interventions but rather to God's providential supervision of these series of secondary causes so that they would, despite the improbability, come together in such a way as to produce life. We might call this view a supervisionist view of the origin of life. God, as the creator and providential governor of the universe, supervises the sequence of secondary causes so that they naturally produce life under his supervision. The best way to understand this, I think, is through adopting a Molinist view of divine providence. According to Molinism, God knows what would happen in any set of circumstances that he might create, and this would include knowing that if these initial conditions were created just so then life would originate as a result. So by decreeing a world in which just these conditions exist and these laws of nature are operative, the origin of life occurs contingently and yet under divine supervision. It seems to me that any of those three models would be available to the Bible-believing Christian – either theistic evolution where God writes the origin of life into the very laws of the universe, or creationism where God miraculously intervenes in the series of secondary causes, or supervisionism where God via his middle knowledge providentially orders these secondary causes so that life originates contingently.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we wrap up the podcast today, it's got me curious what the next area of study you're going to embark upon.

DR. CRAIG: I'm working on doctrine of creation, and so I need to complete my section on creation and evolution. I'm just working on the origin of life right now. Properly-speaking, and this is important to understand, abiogenesis or the origin of life, is not part of evolutionary theory. It's not studied by biologists or biology. It is studied by chemists. It belongs to chemistry because prior to the origin of life, all you have is lifeless chemicals. So it is the chemist who has to be able to explain how these lifeless chemicals somehow assembled themselves to produce the first cellular life on Earth. That, as we've said already, is a challenge that no one has any understanding of. But then once life does arise, the question then becomes: How does biological complexity arise? Does it evolve naturally and become more complex according to standard evolutionary theory? Or might we envision again a sort of progressive creationism or supervisionism to bring about biological complexity in the world? I think we can assess these competing theological perspectives by asking which one accords best with the evidence. So I'll look at that next. Then I will look at a general theory of providence and the possibility of miracles. That will complete my study of the doctrine of creation.^[1]