Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists

by Sean McDowell

The scenario origin-of-life researchers offered to explain life’s initial chemical evolution—the transformation of a complex chemical mixture into living entities strictly through the outworking of chemical and physical events—seemed inadequate to produce the cell’s vastly complex, highly sophisticated, tightly orchestrated chemical systems. Based on my experience as a chemist, I knew that chemical systems could self-organize, but the organization displayed by biochemical systems differs qualitatively from the order possessed by crystals and other types of molecular aggregates that form spontaneously. The best chemists typically experience difficulty getting a few chemicals in a flask to do what they want, even when they expend enormous amounts of mental effort and rely on the past work of other chemists. How could random physical and chemical events yield the amazingly elegant and highly integrated biochemical systems found inside the cell?