Scientists do not have even the slightest clue as to how life could have begun through an unguided naturalistic process
https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/08/10/its-easy-to-be-an-atheist-if-you-ignore-science/- (2016) “[There is] collective cluelessness…those who say this is well worked out, they know nothing, nothing about chemical synthesis…Those who think that scientists understand the details of life’s origin are wholly uninformed. Nobody understands…when will the scientific community confess to the world that they are clueless on life’s origin, that the emperor has no clothes?” James Tour — Professor of Chemistry, Rice University (Synthetic chemist and among the top ten most cited chemists in the world)
- (2011) “The Origin of Life field is a failure.” Eugene Koonin, microbiologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information
- (2011) “With respect to the Origin of Life, I find the more we learn about cells, the more complex they seem; they are just incredibly complex things, and to go from what we can see today and try to reason where it came from, I think is really impossible.” Lee Hartwell, Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2001
- (2007) “How? [did life begin] I have no idea.” George Whitesides, Professor of Chemistry, Harvard University, Winner of the Priestley Medal in Chemistry (second only to the Nobel Prize)
- (2001) “The origin of life appears to me as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication.” Franklin Harold, Professor Emeritus, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Colorado State University
- (1983) “In short, there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on earth.” Sir Fred Hoyle, distinguished British astronomer, physicist, mathematician (without question one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century)
- (1981) “Since Science does not have the faintest idea how life on earth originated…it would only be honest to confess this to other scientists, to grantors, and to the public at large.” Hubert Yockey, physicist and renowned information theorist
As Biochemist Klaus Dose wrote: “Experimentation on the origin of life…has led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution.” Researchers Carl Woese and Gunter Wachtershauser concur: “While we do not have a solution, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem.”
Why are researchers having such difficulties discovering a naturalistic Origin of Life? Let’s let the aforementioned and atheist microbiologist Eugene Koonin answer this question: “Certainly this is not due to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the Origin of Life…these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.”
Translation for the lay-person: Discovering how unguided naturalistic forces could assemble a living cell — a molecular machine that is more sophisticated and functionally complex than anything human technology has ever produced — is a problem of nightmarish proportions.
- “Abiogenesis [life from non-life] strikes many as virtually miraculous…you might get the impression from what I have written not only that the origin of life is virtually impossible, but that life itself is impossible…So what is the answer? Is life a miracle after all?” (Dr. Paul Davies)
- “[We have no naturalistic explanation for] the origin of life, which is unknown so far…As long as the origin of life can’t be explained in natural terms, the hypothesis of an instant Divine creation of life cannot objectively be ruled out.” (Dr. Christian DeDuve, Nobel Prize-Medicine, 1974)
- “There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility.” (George Wald, Nobel Prize-Medicine, 1967)
- “Although a biologist, I must confess I do not understand how life came about…I consider that life only starts at the level of a functional cell. The most primitive cells may require at least several hundred different specific biological macro-molecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together remains a mystery to me. The possibility of the existence of a Creator, of God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem.” (Dr. Werner Arber, Nobel Prize-Medicine, 1978)
- “From my earliest training as a scientist I was very strongly brainwashed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the situation, the state of mind I now find myself in. But there is no logical way out of it; it is just not possible that life could have originated from a chemical accident.” (Chandra Wickramasinghe, mathematician, astronomer, astrobiologist – longtime collaborator of Sir Fred Hoyle)
- “Indeed, such a theory [Intelligent Design] is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.” “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with the laws of physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” (Sir Fred Hoyle)