What are the Odds?
In previous posts, I discussed the challenges facing origin-of-life scientists who are on a quest to answer a simple question that has no easy answers: how did life begin on planet Earth? That article also considered an alternative to the scientific approach—one that is as simple yet complex as the scientific method. This alternative requires a step of faith: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1 NASB).
I discussed the evidence of God's existence in His creation, as the apostle Paul writes about in Romans 1:20. Unfortunately for scientists, the evidence of God's existence, all around us in His creation, is not quantifiable. If that were the case, then all the fuss could be eliminated. Science, by definition, does business in quantifiable evidence, or it's no longer science. God is transcendent and, therefore, will never be quantifiable. What is transcendence? Perhaps Stephen C Meyer said it best: "The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium. The information in DNA also transcends the properties of its material medium."[1]
It is convenient that Dr. Myers’ quote should mention DNA, because DNA is the direction I wanted to take in this discussion. Imagine that. Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is the miraculous messenger conveying a complete blueprint of a living organism in the process of procreation. That's life from life. It says nothing about life from inorganic material at the very beginning of creation. Science would have us believe that God was not part of the process. Let's walk backward in time, returning to the first living organism. This is what is called a top-down approach. DNA is made up of proteins, each protein being made up of amino acids. As discussed in previous posts, origin-of-life scientists posit that amino acids were cooked up in a primordial soup billions of years ago. That may have happened. For it to happen, the correct amino acids would have had to arrange themselves in such a way as to form a functional protein. Many proteins, as in tens of thousands, are encoded in DNA. The exact number will vary depending on the species. The chance of a functional protein being found "among the possible 150-amino-acid compounds, the probability is 84 orders of magnitude (or powers of 10) smaller than the probability finding [a] marked particle in the whole universe. Another way to say that is the probability of finding a functional protein by chance alone is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specified particle among all the particles in the universe."[2] Don't blame me. It's the math doing the talking. In other words, the chances are infinitesimally small that life could have arisen by chance. I will not say that it could never have happened by chance. Never say never, right?
We've gone from primordial soup and science to Scripture and common sense, then brought it around to mathematical odds. Science can explain, or quantify, how life could have arisen, but only back to a certain point. Faith in Scripture tells the whole story, but God is transcendent. He is greater than the sum of all the universe in trying to define its creator. Labeling the wind with a Post-it note would be easier. Skipping ahead to my next post, I look forward to the attempt to dovetail faith and science into an elevator-pitch apologetic.
[1]John Angus Campbell, Stephen C Meyer ed Darwinism, Design and Public Education (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003).
[2] Stephen C. Meyer Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009).
