The idea that non-living materials can assemble to become life has been accepted by the intellectual community that support evolution. And of course, one of the experiments that is commonly referred to is the Stanley Miller experiment. It goes back to the 1950s. Many people today still argue, “Well you know, it’s possible in a laboratory, given the right conditions, to produce building blocks of life.” And this is what Miller did. He had an apparatus which included boiling water. He created an oxygen-free environment; methane was added, hydrogen was added, ammonium hydroxide, and then a 50,000 volt spark. There was a cooling chamber and a rap, and yes, he was able to produce some building blocks—amino acids, glycine, alanine, aspartic and glutamic acid. There were non-biological amino acids—urea, organic acids, formic, acetic, succinic, and lactic. But, there were problems. You see, this was an oxygen-free environment and that would have been totally unrealistic in the original earth if life originated from non-life. And of course, there would be no trap present when life was formed. There was a production of these toxic chemicals which would have destroyed any of these building blocks that were supposedly created spontaneously. Left-handed amino acids are the only ones that are required for life—when in this particular situation, both left-handed and right-handed amino acids were produced. Today most scientists do not refer to Miller’s experiment as
verification of the proof that non-life can become life. For example, an article entitled “A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory,” from the Journal of Theoretical Biology, volume 67,page 396, Hubert Yockey states the following:
The warm little pond scenario was invented ad hoc to serve
as a materialistic, reductionist explanation of the origin of
life. It is unsupported by any other evidence and it will
remain ad hoc until such evidence is found. One must
conclude that contrary to the established and current
wisdom, a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth
by chance and natural causes, which can be accepted on the
basis of fact and not faith, has not yet been written.
(Yockey, 396)
It could not be clearer. In other words, what Yockey is saying, is that it has never been
observed that non-living materials can spontaneously formulate life.
