By Chance?

Evolution does not tell us how the very first generation of living organisms come about. So how does the first living thing really come to life?

A straightforward answer from a materialist or an evolutionist is not hard to understand – by chance. Many groups of atoms smashing into each other for a very long period of time can happen to become the basic unit of life, they claim. Then life can start from there. The idea is that no matter how small a chance it is, as long as there is enough time for the random process to happen, then it can happen. A famous example for illustration starts with the following question:

Can a lot of monkeys, all typing randomly on a typewriter, type a Shakespeare play?

Sounds impossible, right? What if there are a million of monkeys, and they have years and years to type? Does it make it probable? Not really. In fact, the whole observable Universe is remotely large enough to hold the multitude of monkeys needed to write a single scene from one Shakespeare play. The only practicable way for the Universe to produce a play of Shakespeare was through a living person.

How does the monkey and Shakespeare question relate to the first life form? An evolutionist can claim that as the Earth is more than a billion years old, the atoms had enough time to randomly smash into each other and form the first life form. The chance of that to happen is exceedingly small. However, they have enough time to do it!

Is the comparison sensible between the two scenarios – typing a Shakespeare scene by monkeys that play around with typewriters, and forming a simple life form by atoms smashing each other randomly? Do they have similar probabilities?

Certainly not! The complexity of a simple life form is billion and billion times more than a Shakespeare’s play. Instead of a living organism, let’s consider just one single cell.

The size of a cell is around a hundredth to a tenth of a millimeter. For comparison, an average fingernail is about 1800 millimeter wide, which implies that there are more than 20,000 cells across the width of a finger nail. Each cell has nucleus, that holds the chromosomes. Within the chromosomes is a structure called DNA. If we stretch out every strand of DNA in a single human cell end-to-end, it will measure more than 6 feet long but thinner than a trillionth of an inch. The information stored in our DNA can fill 1000 books, each with 500 pages of fine print.

What is the chance of getting a life form by random smashing of atoms? It is less than 1/100000…..0000, with 40,000 zeros in the denominator. For all practical purposes, such a number can be considered as just 0. There is no chance for random physical processes to produce life forms.

There are studies that arrive at different conclusions. I will not discuss them in this post, as I limit all my posts to be “2-min read”. I would discuss those studies in the future if my readers request!