On Tue, 5 Sep 1995 08:44:11 -0500 you wrote:
BH>Stephen quotes Glenn
>GM>I don't know if the origin of life can happen with out God. The
>>evolutionists have not proven their case. But given what science has done in
>>the past that Christians thought would be impossible, I am not going to be
>>surprised if someday they do create life. Christians should at least be
>>prepared for the occurrence of such an event rather than having to attempt to
>>explain why the creation of some life form by scientists isn't the creation
>>of some life form.
BH>Suppose a biochemist succeeds in producing some combinations of
>amino acids that meet all the criteria for life. Would that prove
>that life can or did arise without God? Suppose we could establish
>beyond any reasonable doubt that the beginning of life on earth was
>some process identified by the abiogenesis research community. Would
>that also establish that God was not the creator of life? I don't
>think so. I would consider such knowledge to possibly be knowledge
>about the means God used to bring life about, but it is still
>knowledge about how material systems interact, explained in terms of
>the laws of chemistry and physics. God is Spirit. We don't discover
>the spiritual by studying the material (although we do gain insights
>about God by studying His creation). Simply understanding the
>physical mechanisms by which something occurs does not reveal the
>ultimate cause of them.
Agreed. Eiseley writes movingly:
"If the day comes when the slime of the laboratory for the first time
crawls under man's direction, we shall have great need of humbleness.
It will be difficult for us to believe, in our pride of achievement,
that the secret of life has slipped through our fingers and eludes us
still. We will list all the chemicals and the reactions. The men who
have become gods will pose austerely before the popping flashbulbs of
news photographers, and there will be few to consider so deep is the
mind-set of an age-whether the desire to link life to matter may not
have blinded us to the more remarkable characteristics of both.
As for me, if I am still around on that day, I intend to put on my old
hat and climb over the wall as usual. I shall see strange mechanisms
lying as they lie here now, in the autumn rain, strange pipes that
transported the substance of life, the intricate seedcase out of which
the life has flown. I shall observe no thing green, no delicate
transpirations of leaves, nor subtle comings and goings of vapor. The
little sunlit factories of the chloroplasts will have dissolved away
into common earth.
Beautiful, angular, and bare the machinery of life will lie exposed,
as it now is, to my view. There will be the thin, blue skeleton of a
hare tumbled in a little heap, and crouching over it I will marvel, as
I marvel now, at the wonderful correlation of parts, the perfect
adaptation to purpose, the individually vanished and yet persisting
pattern which is now hopping on some other hill. I will wonder, as
always, in what manner "particles" pursue such devious plans and
symmetries. I will ask once more in what way it is managed, that the
simple dust takes on a history and begins to weave these unique and
never recurring apparitions in the stream of time. I shall wonder
what strange forces at the heart of matter regulate the tiny beating
of a rabbit's heart or the dim dream that builds a milkweed pod.
It is said by men who know about these things that the smallest living
cell probably contains over a quarter of a million protein molecules
engaged in the multitudinous coordinated activities which make up the
phenomenon of life. At the instant of death, whether of man or
microbe, that ordered, incredible spinning passes away in an almost
furious haste of those same particles to get themselves back into the
chaotic, unplanned earth.
I do not think, if someone finally twists the key successfully in the
tiniest and most humble house of life that many of these questions
will be answered, or that the dark forces which create lights in the
deep sea and living batteries in the waters of tropical swamps, or the
dread cycles of parasites, or the most noble workings of the human
brain, will be much if at all revealed. Rather, I would say that if
"dead" matter has reared up this curious landscape of,fiddling
crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to
the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks
contains amazing, if not dreadful powers, and may not impossibly be,
as Hardy has suggested, "but one mask of many worn by the Great Face
behind."
(Eiseley L., "The Immense Journey", 1958, Victor Gollancz,
London, p208-210)
God bless.
Stephen