"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra."
But from what I gather, you're implying something along the lines of "Cells are obviously here and since the only way they could have come to exist is if they sprang to life from randomly mixed inorganic soup, and so therefore that is how it happened..?" I Taut' so, I Taut' so...!
Actually, I thought the quote was somewhat conciliatory, as it concedes that the universe holds ineffable mysteries still impenetrable to science. However, I will hold fast to the idea that there is no scientific argument for the impossibility of the spontaneous origin of life, and furthermore, that the history of scientific discovery has done nothing but offer encouragement to the idea, as the conditions of life as we see it fit so extremely well with such an origin.
On the other side of the coin, I am always bemused by the idea of a Designer God, or as a recent poster put it, God the Great Engineer. Here we are asked to impute specifically human endeavors to God, as if man were not made in the image of God, but God is rather a man carried to some kind of fever pitch. It strikes me as almost comical. And, it is entirely unbiblical! In Genesis, God speaks and commands. There is no mention of designing, and no one ever seems to venture any sort of guess about what sort of activity might be implied by the term. As a result, the doctrines of Creationism and Intelligent Design seem to amount to nothing more than a demand for pious silence on the subject.
Well then I will hold fast to the idea that there is no scientific argument for the impossibility of special creation by God himself. And furthermore, that the history of science has tried extensively to prove that life came from nonlife by natural process and has failed, and that eventually science will progress to the point where scientists will indeed be able to make life in the lab by building it atom by atom with really fine tweezers only to realize that all they've proved is that life has been designed in their test tube! [grin]
But seriously, have you done the calculations of how many combonations of molecule orders would need to be tried in order to get the first metabolizing reproducing cell? If a cell only had 100,000 base pairs, wouldn't that be about (roughly) 1 followed by about 60,000 zeros, or 10*10^60000?
Well lets see how many seconds there are in a trillion years:
3.1536*10^19. Okay, so doesn't that mean that in order to try all the possible combinations of those 100,000 base pairs in 1 trillion years, we'll need to try about 10*10^59984 different combinations per second?
Well, so maybe there was different there were multiple sets of these little trial and error processes going on at the same time. How many could there have been? Well, if we take the number of atoms of the earth to be 1.33*10^50, then the experiment can be going on in parallel 1.33*10^45 times. So now each of these experiments only needs to be happening 10*10^59939 times per second.
Okay, just to be generous, let's say that there are say about a trillion possible DNA sequences that will produce a living reproducing cell. Furthermore, let's assume that statistically speaking, for any given working cell code, it will be found in 10% of the tries it would take to try every combination. Let's also assume that no non-working combination is ever tried a second time, thus wasting time.
Now the number of experiments that would need to be tried every second in order to get a single living reproducing cell in a trillion years is much better: We have a trillion times 10 times 2 better chance due to these generous assumptions. That's 20*10^12 better chance, so now we only need about 10*10^59927 experiments per second.
In other words, every bit of matter in the world consists of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, and every single second for a trillion years, every group of 100,000 molecules are going through 10*10^59927 tests per second.
That's a pretty big number. That's higher a number then all the atoms in the earth. As a matter of fact, it's a higher number then all the atoms in the entire universe many times over - and I don't mean just slightly higher, I mean unimaginatively higher! There aren't words to pronounce numbers this big. Well, you could say "ten trillion trillion trillion.." but you'd have to say "trillion" 4994 times - which at 2 times a second would only take you about 42 minutes.
Those little molecules are going to be moving faster then the speed of light!
Anyway, these are just very rough calculations to illustrate the concept of statistical likelihood that a living cell did actually spring to life by natural means.
So my question is this - have you done that math (hopefully more carefully then I) and come to the conclusion that "Yes, this is actually workable?"
Or am I confused about something? Where did I got wrong? How did you do the math? I'm no genius to be sure but I try my best and always try to learn.
Thanks,
-Jesse