Abiogenesis
How Did Non-life Give Rise to Life?
This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.
From the dawn of time until today, how life first got going has mystified humanity. It’s tempting to say, “I don’t understand it; therefore, God did it.” But answers that explain everything with a single word do not explain anything in sufficient detail to guide humanity in mastering a topic.
Some offer panspermia as an explanation. That is the idea that life permeates this vast Universe, and extremophile bacteria seeded life on newly formed planets and moons by hitching rides on asteroids and comets. But panspermia doesn’t explain the first formation of life from non-living building blocks; it simply pushes the seminal event to some undisclosed new location.
Science has yet to fully explain how abiogenesis — life from non-living chemicals — occurred, but we have recently assembled many pieces of the puzzle. First, you need a habitable planet. Earth provided that, as it was a rocky planet with water and was orbiting in the habitable zone of a suitable main-sequence star, our Sun. Next, life’s precursor organic building blocks must form. Our solar system’s protoplanetary disk had all the…
