ANSWERING THE NEW ATHEISM

1. ANSWERING THE NEW ATHEISM Mesa Church of Christ June – August 2012

2. Harold Urey (1962) "[A]ll of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did."

3. Francis Crick (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 have been satisfied to get it going."

4. Harold Klein (1991) "The simplest bacterium is so [darn] complicated from the point of a chemist that it is almost impossible to imagine how it happened."

5. Franklin M. Harold (2001) "It would be agreeable to conclude this book with a cheery fanfare about science closing in, slowly but surely, on the ultimate mystery; but the time for rosy rhetoric is not yet at hand. The origin of life appears to me as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication."

6. Richard Dawkins (2008) Stein: “Well how did it start?” Dawkins: “Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event that it must have been, we know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.” Stein: “And what was that?” Dawkins: “It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.” Stein: “Right. And how did that happen?” Dawkins: “I've told you, we don't know.” Stein: “So you have no idea how it started?” Dawkins: “No no. Nor has anybody.”

7. Freeman Dyson (2010) “The origin of life is the deepest mystery in the whole of science. Many books and learned papers have been written about it, but it remains a mystery. There is an enormous gap between the simplest living cell and the most complicated naturally occurring mixture of nonliving chemicals. We have no idea when and how and where this gap was crossed.”

8. John Horgan (2011) “Exactly 20 years ago, I wrote an article for Scientific American that, in draft form, had the headline above. My editor nixed it, so we went with something less dramatic: ‘In the Beginning…: Scientists are having a hard time agreeing on when, where and—most important—how life first emerged on the earth.’ That editor is gone now, so I get to use my old headline, which is even more apt today. Dennis Overbye just wrote a status report for the New York Times on research into life's origin, based on a conference on the topic at Arizona State University. Geologists, chemists, astronomers and biologists are as stumped as ever by the riddle of life.”

9. Eugene Koonin (2011) “The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science, but it is also one of the most important. Origin-of-life research has evolved into a lively, interdisciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the ‘dirty’ rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth.

10. Eugene Koonin (continued) Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.”

11. Ann Gauger "Proteins are the building blocks of life. They are the structural parts that give cells shape, the enzymes that build or break down the molecules of life, the motors that transport things, the agents that send signals and regulate the activity of other proteins and genes, and the morphogens that help determine the development of the organism."

13. Nucleotide sequence 1 1 4 1 3 1 2 1 2 1 2 2 1 3 4 1 2 2 1 3 1 1 3 4 2 1 3

14. Protein illustration: string of 48 amino acids thisisveryshortforaproteinbutitisjustanexampleok DNA nucleotide codes for amino acids 133=a 142=b 122=e 132=f 112=h 113=i 144=j 214=k 213=l 212=m 141=n 131=o 134=p 123=r 114=s 111=t 143=u 121=v 211=x 124=y 111112113114113114121122123124114112131123 111132131123133134123131111122113141142143 111113111113114144143114111133141122211133 213134213122131214

15. Protein illustration: string of 48 amino acids somepeoplethinkhisillustrationsarereallyhorrible DNA nucleotide codes for amino acids 133=a 142=b 122=e 132=f 112=h 113=i 144=j 214=k 213=l 212=m 141=n 131=o 134=p 123=r 114=s 111=t 143=u 121=v 211=x 124=y 114131212122134122131134213122111112113141 214112113114113213213143114111123133111113 131141114133123122123122133213213124112131 123123113142213122

16. Nucleotide sequence 1 1 4 1 3 1 2 1 2 1 2 2 1 3 4 1 2 2 1 3 1 1 3 4 2 1 3

17. Stephen Meyer “[T]he probability that a particular gene would arise by chance is roughly the same as the probability that its corresponding gene product (the protein that the gene encodes) would do so. For that reason, the relevant probability calculation can be made either by analyzing the odds of arranging amino acids into a functional protein or by analyzing the odds of arranging nucleotide bases into a gene that encodes that protein. Because it turns out to be simpler to make the calculation using proteins, that's what most origin-of-life scientists have done.”

18. Odds of randomly assembling: protein of 100 amino acids – 1 in 10130 (1/20100 = 1/1.2 x 10130) When allow variation still smaller than 1 in 1065

19. Rarity of amino acid sequences yielding a functional protein For a modest protein of 150 amino acids, only one in every 1074 sequences of amino acids would be able to fold into stable "function-ready" structures and thus have the possibility of functioning as a protein.

20. Stephen Meyer "When one considers the full complement of functional biomolecules required to maintain minimal cell function and vitality, one can see why chance-based theories of origin of life have been abandoned."

21. Protein illustration: string of 48 amino acids somepeoplethinkhisillustrationsarereallyhorrible DNA nucleotide codes for amino acids 133=a 142=b 122=e 132=f 112=h 113=i 144=j 214=k 213=l 212=m 141=n 131=o 134=p 123=r 114=s 111=t 143=u 121=v 211=x 124=y 114131212122134122131134213122111112113141 214112113114113213213143114111123133111113 131141114133123122123122133213213124112131 123123113142213122

22. Richard Dawkins - "The machine code of the gene is uncannily computer-like." Bill Gates – "Human DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software ever created."

23. Hubert Yockey "It is highly relevant to the origin of life that the genetic code is constructed to confront and solve the problems of communication and recording by the same principles found both in the genetic information system and in modern computer and communication codes."

24. David Goodsell “[T]his is one of the unanswered riddles of biochemistry: which came first, proteins or protein synthesis? If proteins are needed to make proteins, how did the whole thing get started?”

25. Karl Popper “What makes the origin of life and the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: the code cannot be translated except by using certain products of its translation. This constitutes a really baffling circle: a vicious circle, it seems for any attempt to form a model, or a theory, of the genesis of the genetic code.”