Tuesday 25 August 2015

Life Does Not Come from Hydrothermal Vents

Image courtesy of Dr. Robert Embley/NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, public domain.





Joel Kontinen

It is seldom easy to follow naturalistic logic on the origin of life. A recent example might illustrate quite well what I mean:

Researchers found water “oozing from rocky fractures 2 kilometres below the surface at the Kidd mine near Timmins in Ontario.” The researchers believe that the rocks are

“the ancient remains of hydrothermal vents formed at the bottom of Earth’s early oceans, and that means the water they contain could reveal important details about the chemistry that might have occurred at such vents before life began exerting its influence.”

One of the problems with this scenario is that the water “appears to show no signs of life.” The researchers think that it is “1.5 billion years old” and has “all the ingredients of a primordial soup.”

But there’s no life. Chemicals don’t just turn into living cells. And a lack of time is obviously not a valid option.

What they overlooked is that life only comes from life. All attempts to construe even a faintly plausible naturalistic explanation of how life began have turned out to be utter failures.

Charles Darwin’s warm little pond didn’t work, and neither did the water world hypothesis. The RNA world is not viable, and panspermia or life from space has not fared any better. Saying that life is a product of many lucky turns of events is a non-solution.

The only viable solution for the origin of life dilemma is introduced in the Book of Genesis: "In the beginning, God created."



Source:

Barras, Colin. 2015. Watery time capsule hints at how life got started on early Earth. New Scientist (20 August).