Did Life Start By Chance?

Molecular biophysicist, Horold Morowitz (Yale University), calculated the odds of life beginning under natural conditions (spontaneous generation). He calculated, if one were to take the simplest living cell and break every chemical bond within it, the odds that the cell would reassemble under ideal natural conditions (the best possible chemical environment) would be one chance in 10^{100,000,000,000.}You will have probably have trouble imagining a number so large, so Hugh Ross provides us with the following example. If all the matter in the Universe was converted into building blocks of life, and if assembly of these building blocks were attempted once a microsecond for the entire age of the universe. Then instead of the odds being 1 in 10^{100,000,000,000}, they would be 1 in 10^{99,999,999,916}

In Chuck Misslers book "The Creator Beyond Time and Space" he looks at this number a little differently. "This number is so large it would take several thousand blank books just to write it out. To put this number into perspective, it is more likely that you and your entire extended family would win the state lottery every week for a million years than for a bacterium to form by chance."

Missler also states in his book "Mathematicians tell us that if an event has a probability which is less likely then one chance in 10⁵⁰, then that event is mathematically impossible. Such an event, if it were to occur, would be considered a miracle."

References :

-- Hugh Ross, "The Creator and the Cosmos", Copyright 1993 by Reasons to Believe. Revised edition, copyright 1995. NavPress, p.149-150.

-- Mark Eastman, M.D. and Chuck Missler, "The Creator Beyond Space and Time", Copyright 1996 The Word For Today.

-- Horold Morowitz, Energy Flow in Biology (New York; Academic Press, 1968)

-- Robert Shapiro, Origins: A Skeptics Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, (New York: Summit Books, 1986), p. 128.

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