Abiogenesis is magic, not the Biblical account of God's creation.
Even in defending abiogenesis, biologist Francis Crick acknowledged in 1981:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.” 13
Abiogenesis is not only unproven, it is mathematically impossible. No wonder both Orgel and Crick called it a miracle. Other scenarios have therefore been suggested. Hoyle and others postulate life was transplanted from outer space14 —which moves the origins problem to another time and place. The multiverse hypothesis, proposed by leading origin-of-life researcher Eugene Koonin,15 is currently in vogue—it replaces infinite time with an infinity of universes to account for the extraordinarily improbable existence of at least one life-sustaining planet (see here).
The real answer may be that abiogenesis is the creation myth of a culture with no need for God—a culture to which physicist Lee Smolin can proclaim: “there is nothing outside the universe.”16 This statement is an unsustainable myth, yet a creator is the only alternative to abiogenesis, and this undermines the mythological foundation of the faith of atheists.
The next article will continue this theme with a discussion of macroevolution, another critical part of the theory of evolution.
