sam wrote:
The origin of life is about as complicated as the origin of information, in the words of John Lennox.
Um, news flash - John Lennox is not a biologist or chemist. Looking to him for biochemistry answers is like asking Steven Hawking about Basketball strategy. If you want biochemisty expertise, ask a biochemist, not a mathematician.
I'm no mathematician like him, but the odds of life forming by chance are virtually zero. We can argue all we want about how the first cell came about but the real question is, are we capable of knowing the origin of life?
As has been pointed out, the creationist "calculations" are bogus. This is because they are looking for the probability of forming a whole bacterial cell like today's bacteria from basic organic molecules in one fell swoop. That's as silly as calculating the odds of forming a modern human from random collections of organic molecules, or a 747 from a junkyard.
You don't need to form a modern bacterium. You only need to form a molecule that can sometimes make rather poor copies of itself - and many molecules are self-catalytic. Natural selection will select for better copiers, well before life or even cells exist. Have that be enclosed in a vesicle is easy at any place where there are crashing waves and phospholipids. Abiogenesis is a rich field, with a lot of discoveries being made ever year, and to pretend it's like what Lennox proposes only shows that you are clueless about the field.
Plus, creationists use it to argue against evolution, when in fact, abiogenesis is completely irrelevant to evolution, which looks at what happened after life appeared.
For me, I'm perfectly happy to speculate that God miraculously made the first cell (after all, individual cells and especially pre-cells don't fossilize well, so we have comparatively little direct data). However, because it seems quite possible that God used natural means there, I'm reluctant to call a miracle when we have no evidence of such, and especially reluctant to acquiesce to the dishonest tactics creationists use in this area, for fear of losing credibility among the unsaved (not to mention the 8th or 9th commandment, depending on your denominational numbering system used).
Perhaps worst of all, claiming that God used a miracle to start life is bad apologetics - it's a classic God-of-the-gaps claim. Just like claiming that God miraculously started language, or cities, or farming, or Homo sapiens, or mammals, or even the internet, it sets Christianity up to look silly when the natural causes are found, and is unneeded anyway, because God acts through the natural world all the time anyway.
Papias