The Miller-Urey Experiment Didn't Explain THIS - FAS2624

SPEAKER A In the 1950s, the Miller-Urey experiment created amino acids in a test tube, and the world cheered. They thought they had solved the origin of life. But 70 years later, we hit a brick wall. We can make the letters, but we can't write the book. Today we're looking at the missing editor of life. Why can nature create random chemicals but never the specific information found in DNA. Welcome to Faith and Science. I am Kaysie Vokurka. Joining me to discuss this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome once again, Dr. John. SPEAKER B Hello, Kaysie. SPEAKER A Dr. John has written a book called The Big Argument: Does God Exist? And in today's program, we'll be looking a little bit more at some of the topic found in chapter 7 by George Jaber. Now, John, in the last 100 years, there's been a huge amount of evidence and information that's accumulated regarding the chemical complexity that's undergone Regarding life. And so the question is, what are the main obstacles the proponents of chemical evolution have to actually explain? SPEAKER B Yes. Well, as you mentioned earlier, the Urey-Miller experiment certainly created a lot of excitement back then. But we've learned a lot since then. And one of the things is I guess recapping on some earlier episodes is that the problem that proponents of chemical evolution, that is that somehow non-living molecules, minerals, whatever, could come together and form a living organism. You've gotta form these initial biomonomers. And that's what was shown in the Urey-Miller experiment. They were able to produce some of the biomonomers. So that got everybody excited. SPEAKER A So these are like the amino acids and some of those individual chemicals. SPEAKER B And since then, we've improved the ability to do that. We can do it, you know, we've discovered we can do more under different conditions of different mixtures of gases and high voltages and all this sort of thing. But the problem is we still have to form biopolymers. So they have to be linked together into a biopolymer. And then we also have to set up the metabolic pathways. In other words, all these chemical react— Wait, once we have these biopolymers, they can form the structure, but a living organism is alive. We've got a whole lot of biochemical reactions that are happening. Bits have to move around, these sort of things. You know, E. coli have flagella that have to spin and all this sort of thing so they can move towards food gradients. All this sort of thing. So how do all these complex chemical reactions then have to be set up? And then the final thing is that we have to put all those chemical reactions into a state of disequilibrium so that they're out of balance by just the right amount that we keep all the reactions going. So that one reaction is providing the ingredients for the next one, for the next one, and back to the beginning again. SPEAKER A So those successive steps just got more and more complicated. SPEAKER B It sounded like, yeah, they've done the first one. They've made the biomonomers. We still have to make the biopolymers. We've still got to set up all the biochemistry and all the chemical reactions and so forth, systems for creating enzymes and all this sort of thing. And then once we have all those set up, we've then got to start them up. Hundreds of biochemical reactions all at the same time, all in the same state of equilibrium. Now, it's interesting, back in the, probably the '60s, I think it was, the professor of biochemistry at San Francisco State University, Dean Kenyon, Dr. Dean Kenyon, wrote the first textbook that attempted to explain how non-living cells could form a living organism. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER B It was called Biochemical Predestination. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B And his view was that nature itself had the ability, had an innate ability to put things together in order to create life. SPEAKER A Right. SPEAKER B So he, he said that there was some sort of preexistent, just like the universe exists, we have the law of gravity and so forth, that there was some sort of preexisting factor, which you call like predestination, which enabled chemicals to do the chemical reactions needed to form life. So that was his theory. Now, it's very interesting that Kenyon was actually later challenged by a Christian student to explain some of the problems that were arising in this model. And Dean Kenyon actually has become a creationist. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER B Yeah. And a young earth creationist at that, actually. Yes. And he talks about how he certainly has had a lot of opposition from in this department, but he's convinced now that the biochemistry overwhelmingly points to the impossibility of nature producing a living organism. So that's why he believes now in supernatural creation by a creator. And he thinks that the biblical account makes the most sense in terms of the biochemistry that we understand. So his testimony is on on YouTube. Look it up, Dean Kenyon, Darwin of Our Time, something like that, I think. SPEAKER A Wow, so he wrestled with these questions and what does it take to actually form these cells from his own academic background, and he was coming to this conclusion. SPEAKER B Yeah, so there we have one of the top biochemists in the world at the time who wrote the first book attempting to explain how it could occur. And he realized, yep, no, it is actually absolutely impossible. And we use that word very meaningfully, absolutely impossible. And I think it's very important that people listening to this, that biochemists and this sort of thing recognize this, that they look into the biochemistry involved in living organisms because it clearly points to the fact that it's absolutely impossible. We can never come up with a system using known biochemistry that can explain the origin of life on Earth. And I think we've, you know, pretty well understand all the, the basic chemical reactions associated with living organisms, the stability constants and energy profiles, all this sort of thing of these reactions to know that and the stereochemistry of what's involved to know it's absolutely impossible. Yeah. SPEAKER A Wow. So Jaber, in the chapter, he argues that biological information needs an editor, essentially, to distinguish between random sequences and useful ones, just like we need that for spelling. And in an evolutionary worldview, who or what would or could perform this editing role? That would enable the cell to function in such a sophisticated way? SPEAKER B Yeah, sure. So this relates to the problem of forming the biopolymers. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B And particularly the, you know, the DNA code, for example. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B And so what he's talking about is that, say, somehow chemically you form millions of these different amino acids, right? And they're there in a certain, you've somehow got chemical conditions where they're going to react and combine and link up with one another, right? So this is pretty amazing, but somehow this occurred under some special conditions. How are you going to know that they're in the right order? What's the natural selection process? Because you haven't got a living organism to apply, you know, survival of the fittest. And so in order for something like that to work and really produce something that is meaningful, you need an editor. That's like if you've got all the letters on your typewriter, but you put a little 1-year-old punching away on that, or a monkey or something, the chances of typing out something that's meaningful— you need somebody with a mind to know. Now, even if you typed out some words, you know, banana, elf, biochemistry, water, you know, they're words. You could possibly type, you know, words out. It would take a long time just to type those words, but they're not going to be a code to make anything. You know, you just imagine when you get a, you know, a DVD player or even just the instruction manual for your mobile phone, how to use it sort of thing. How many letters and words are in that little booklet telling you how to switch it on, how to turn it off, how to open, how to do the different settings? SPEAKER A Yeah, 'cause we're assuming a naturalistic random process, aren't we, of the formation of these poems. So we're just assuming like getting a pile of letters and throwing them on a page and expecting that there's going to be a bunch of them there that are words that are meaningful. SPEAKER B Yeah, well, that's right. You can, even if you generated words, Words don't necessarily indicate meaning, just like I said. SPEAKER A Well, that's true. You've gotta make sentences, don't you? SPEAKER B Yeah, banana, newspaper, elf, biochemistry, water, going, high. Yeah. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B They're all words. What does that all mean? So it has to have an editor and there has to be sentences and sequences. And that's exactly the requirement. And this is the major problem when, you know, people raved about the Uri Miller experiment. It was a little while, I think, before. Another couple of years before DNA was fully elucidated. But the thing is, we now know that the codes are extremely complex, even for these, you know, quite simple, you know, organisms. They've got, you say, you've got quite complex sequences. And the probability of even just, you know, randomly arriving at just fairly short sequences that are meaningful becomes astronomical. And by that we mean, you know, the probability is so large it just isn't gonna happen in the time of the universe. But again, we, one of the important things that I think as people speculate about all these things and putting these nucleic acids together and this sort of thing is that the biochemical reactions don't go in nature. It's very difficult to even get them to go in test tubes. You know, in highly sophisticated laboratories using very pure chemicals and, you know, just the right temperature control and just the right atmosphere control and this sort of thing. And I think this is a point that is often lost, and possibly by biochemists and by biologists, is that, hang on, you can look at all these things, but you've got to make the chemical reactions go. And most of these chemical reactions, the synthesis of these particular molecules, will only occur in the environment of a living cell. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER B They won't— it's very difficult to get them to go to any degree of complexity in a test tube. SPEAKER A Yeah, that's, that's a lot because it's, it's assuming that these are not going to go in a living cell because we're trying to make a living cell in the first place. So, yeah. So that's very interesting. Now, Nobel Prize winner Max Delbrück, he had something to say about the evolutionary recipe of life, which is quite interesting. What did his comment reveal about what scientific experts really think regarding some of these theories on how life started? SPEAKER B Yeah, well, Delbrück, of course, was a very eminent biologist. He won the Nobel Prize in biology a few years ago. And one of the things that's quite interesting in that He recognized this major problem with the biogenesis, and he's quoted as saying, "Look, don't show me any books, don't tell me anything about biogenesis until you've shown me that it actually works. I wanna know that you just put this with this and you wait 3 months and you got things crawling in there." You know? SPEAKER A Yeah, okay. SPEAKER B And he said, "I don't wanna hear any more about it." He didn't wanna progress the year. Yeah, yeah. And essentially what he's saying is, look, we don't know. There's no known evidence. You know, stop saying that it happened, stop putting it in. Well, no, it's not saying stop putting it in textbooks. He's just saying, I don't wanna read about it until you actually have some data that works. And what he's essentially saying here, we've got one of the world's top biologists, that year, the world's top biologist, saying, we don't know how abiogenesis occurs at the moment. And so don't bother me with it until we do. And the thing is that we still don't, although textbooks claiming that happened. Why? Because we are here. But really, and Jeva points this out, I think, he essentially points out, look, the current theories in this area are science fiction. And the essence is this, either life arose by itself or life was created supernaturally. They're the only two possibilities. Life arose naturally or it arose supernaturally. We know from all our science that it's absolutely impossible for life to arise naturally. Surely this points there must be a creator. The evidence is in our face. The evidence is overwhelming. Science has proved there must be a creator. And we have overwhelming evidence for the the witnessed miracles that are recorded in the Bible, that that is the creator God of the Bible who is outside this universe. He's non-material, he's spiritual, and he created everything. The evidence is powerfully there. The science that we have powerfully supports the biblical origin of life. SPEAKER A Well, thank you for making that reasoning very clear about what the evidence is really telling us. The question of the origin of life from, from non-life. So thank you for sharing that. Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence or known someone who has? What helped you through it? Share your thoughts or stories in the comments. Your journey could inspire someone else who's searching for answers.