Accounting for Life’s Origins on Earth

Recently, I attended a programme that brought together some leading scientists to discuss the issue of how life emerged on Earth. Now, this is among the most important existential issues of all, a topic of endless debate, and something that at least most people must likely have wondered about, even if just in passing, some time or the other, and here were men who had done considerable scientific research on this truly momentous subject who were to confabulate on it! I didn’t want to miss the programme! And so, I went.

If I understood them correctly, the speakers seemed to assume that life, and everything else in the universe, basically consists of matter. Hence, according to their understanding, life’s origin on Earth must have an exclusively materialistic explanation. Now, this basic assumption inevitably greatly limits and skews the scope of investigation into the issue of the origins of life on Earth. Assuming beforehand itself, without sufficient reason, that any worthy explanation of the phenomenon of life’s origins on Earth must necessarily be a materialistic one rules out the possibility of a non-material explanation of the phenomenon that might, in fact, be at least equally plausible and worthy.

Seeming to consider life to be synonymous with bodily existence—i.e., existence in a physical or material body—the speakers seemed to me to struggle to try to explain how mere inert material particles somehow, at some time in the remote past, allegedly combined to produce living, conscious, sentient beings, who, according to their worldview, were basically the physical bodies built up from these material particles. That, in brief, seemed to me to be their basic submission for the origin of life on Earth: all standard Darwinian, and so, nothing really new, I suppose.

Now, the fact of the matter is that you don’t need to be an ‘expert’ to intuitively know that it is simply not possible for inert particles of matter to do anything even remotely clever, leave alone something as astoundingly intelligent as combining together to produce consciousness or living, throbbing life-forms, spirit-beings inhabiting physical bodies. But so wedded did the speakers in the programme appear to a materialistic worldview that, if I recall rightly, not once in the entire lengthy discussion did they even once use the term ‘consciousness’ or ‘spirit’—which is a fundamental aspect of life and which simply cannot be reduced to a product of material factors, contrary to what materialistic scientists likely insist.

If I remember correctly, the materialistic worldview through which the speakers sought to explain the origin of life on Earth articulated went unquestioned in the Q&A session that followed, which allowed for some audience participation. I don’t remember even one member of the audience mentioning the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness or the spiritual dimension of living beings, which a materialistic explanation of the origin of life on Earth simply cannot sensibly account for. And to me, most significantly, all through the discussions and the interactions that followed with the audience, not once was any reference made to what not just I, but thousands of millions of other people, ever since the dawn of human beings on Earth, have firmly regarded as the one cause behind all of life, be it on Earth or elsewhere, too: The Transcendent Creator God.

For vast millions of people even today, the existence of such a God is the only rationally convincing, intuitively resonant, simplest and most logical explanation, not just for life on Earth but for the existence of Earth itself and, indeed, for Existence as such. But so complete seemed to be a materialistic consensus in the course of the programme that the hypothesis of the Creator God as being the cause of the origin of life on Earth was not referred to even once, not even simply in order to rebut it. It seemed as if this hypothesis merited no mention at all, not even in order to dismiss it.

In this regard, these profound words attributed to the Lord Jesus are most pertient:

I praise you, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. (Matthew 11:25)