The Beginning of Existence

Last updated on: August 10, 2023 at 11:41 am by Richard E. Simmons III

The Beginning of Existence 2023-08-10T11:41:12-06:00 Richard E. Simmons III

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When you try to take in the vastness of the universe we live in, you have to marvel at its size and grandeur. As Christians we are overwhelmed by the thought that God created it all. The prophet Isaiah declares, “Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created the stars, the One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all day by name; because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power.” (40:26)

What makes this so remarkable is something the Apostle Paul said in Romans 4:17, that God “calls into being that which does not exist.” If you think about it, that is what Jesus did when He turned water into wine. Wine comes from grapes. There were no grapes present. He brought it into existence that which did not exist.

This is what is so baffling to modern science. They have no answer to the question “How did we get here?” They have no idea how the universe began nor how life came into existence.

Up until the 1970s, maybe even the 1980s, the prevailing belief in science stemming from Darwin’s landmark work was that if you were to go back to the primeval beginnings of the Earth, you would find it covered with countless pools of water amid barren and rocky expanses, chemically enriched with the “necessary ingredients” to create life. These small bodies of water and their ingredients are referred to as “primordial soup,” and, as the theory goes, the Earth at that time was an intense environment of constant electrical activity. Lightning would, of course, regularly strike this soup, at which point various amino acids, the building blocks of life, would be formed. Once these amino acids were formed, natural selection somehow takes over and life begins to evolve. Millions of years later, here we are, building computers and flying all over the world in airplanes. This theory really took off in 1953 when a scientist named Stanley Miller demonstrated, in the laboratory, how this could actually happen.

Miller created a pool of chemicals, the “necessary ingredients” to create an amino acid. He then pumped electrical charges into it, and amino acids were formed. As you can imagine, Darwinian scientists were elated because if the origin of life can be explained solely through natural processes, then God is no longer necessary.

Lee Strobel said that when he heard this taught in his high school biology class, it dramatically transformed his belief in God and led him to atheism. He said, “That’s when I became an atheist.” I, too, remember being taught this in my high school biology class in 1970.

Miller’s experiment was hailed as a major breakthrough in science. Carl Sagan believed it was one of the most significant things that happened in man’s quest for knowledge because it proved that life could arise on other planets.

The only way for Miller’s experiment to work, however, is that the atmosphere of the Earth had to be a hydrogen-rich mixture of methane, ammonia, and water vapor. The only problem with this theory is that there is no real evidence for such an atmosphere. Still there were those who believed the theory was sound because the experiment did produce amino acids.

Then in the 1980s, NASA scientists actually demonstrated that the primitive Earth had little if any volume of methane, ammonia, or hydrogen. Instead, the atmosphere at that time was composed of water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. This new information blew Miller’s theory right out of the water. Miller’s experiment, a theory on the origins of life, which had been taught for years as an indisputable scientific fact, imploded. And twenty-first century science doesn’t, in fact, have any indisputable evidence on how life began on Earth. Miller admitted the following in the periodical Scientific American nearly forty years after his famous experiment:

“The problem of the origin of life has turned out to be much more difficult than I, and most other people, envisioned.”

Klaus Dose, a biochemist who is considered by the National Academy of Sciences as being at the highest level of expertise on the origin of life, says:

“More than thirty years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present, all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.”

Even Charles Darwin acknowledged:

“Science as yet throws no light on the far higher problems of the essence or origin of life.”

Finally, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick, who, along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, discovered the molecular structure of DNA, says:

“Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I swear I will never write another one because there is too much speculation running after too few facts.”

Then Crick continues—and bear in mind, he was antagonistic toward any belief in God whatsoever:

“The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle… So many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going.”

Crick is correct, it was a miracle. It was a miracle of God, who called into being that which did not exist.

Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author.

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