Institute of Origins Education

There are only two ways that life can originate.

• Spontaneous creation, where an intelligent being is involved, or
• Evolutionary model, where a slow and gradual process causes an inanimate object to come alive.

The problem with evolution is that it violates the Law of Biogenesis and Cell Theory. Since laws and theories have observational evidence as support, any model that contradicts is flawed (see Science, Uniformity, and Causality). If you can not create life, you have no evolution. In the 16th century it was believed that fruit flies would spontaneously come from fruit, geese from barnacle, mice from dirty clothes, and bees from dead calves. This was until Spallanzani (1780) and Pasteur (1860) did experiments and came up with the Law of Biogenesis that explains how all life comes from life, and spontaneous generation does not happen.

Natural laws by themselves can not create specified complexity. Natural laws can create things like a canyon, but can not create the faces on Mt. Rushmore. The DNA on a single celled animal contains enough information to fill one volume of an encyclopedia while the information in the RNA and the rest of the cell can fill an entire library of information. All that information has to be in the right order for the cell to function.

• If you had a printer with all the necessary products to create a dictionary, what random natural process would be required to print the dictionary?
• How long would it take if you watched the printer try create the dictionary by itself?
• It was Carl Sagan that said "A single message from outer space would prove there was intelligent life on other planets," but an entire library of information inside the most simple cell doesn't prove that intelligence put it there?

Origin of New and More Complex Life Forms

Some evolutionists will claim that mutations are the process that will take something from simple to complex; however, mutations only scramble or duplicate existing information and cannot create new information. Single celled animals do not have the information to create teeth, bones, or even skin. To add these features new information has to be added to the DNA. Since information always comes from the mind of a sender, then it is not possible for mutations to cause evolution.

Some evolutionists say we are all related because we all have the same type of skeletal structures, such as how a man, dog, whale, and bird all have a radius and ulna in their arms, and that proves we all came from a common ancestor. The problem is that those similar structures all come from different genes on the chromosomes. If everyone had a common ancestor that would mean the genes that make those bones would contain the same instructions in everyone, but they do not. Common structures that have similar purposes yet are completely unrelated are evidence for common designer.

Law of Probability and Monkeys Typing

The Law of Probability is a formula to determine the chance that something will happen given a set of variables. You have probably heard it said that you could get monkeys to type an encyclopedia given enough monkeys and enough typewriters. According to evolution life started out as non-life and through a slow process eventually became alive as a "simple cell." This sounded like a very reasonable theory back when microscopes could only see cells as small bags of liquid but now we know that there is no such thing as a "simple cell." Each cell is like a small city with a Cell Membrane like bridges holding multiple cells together and allowing certain chemicals to pass, a Cell Wall as a foundation to hold everything in place, Vacuoles as warehouses that hold water or chemicals vital to production, a Nucleus as a central hub of information, the Chloroplast for production of energy, the Endoplasmic Reticulum that are highways for the chemicals to transfer to other parts of the cell or other cells, Ribosome factories turning raw material amino acids into proteins, Golgi Apparatus refineries to take crude proteins and convert them into usable ones, and the Mitochondrion that are the power substations that take the food and turn it into usable energy. The simplest protein known today is made of about 2000 amino acids. The law of probability concludes that it is impossible for anything to occur if it has an chance in less than 1 in 10⁵⁰, but the odds of forming a basic protein is 1 chance in 10¹³⁹ (that is 10 followed by 139 zeros). The odds of forming even that most basic cell is 1 chance in 10^40,000 (that is 10 followed by 40,000 zeros).

Now when people speak of such large numbers the brain just tries to stack them into scalable sizes so it is easier to understand. To show you how large of a number we are talking about imagine your body. Now imagine how many cells are in your body. Now think of how many atoms are in each of your cells. To give you a hint there are trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions........... and trillions of atoms in each of your cells. Now with that in mind try to think of how big the entire universe is and everything in it. There are only 10⁸⁰ atoms in the entire universe.

• A single protein - 1:10¹³⁹
• A single cell - 1:10^40,000
• Number of atoms in the entire universe - 10⁸⁰
• Number of electrons that would fit in the universe - 10¹³⁰

How long would it take for monkeys to type just the title "Encyclopedia Britannica"? If we gave them a keyboard that had 48 keys on it the chance that they would get a "e" followed by a "n" is 1:48 x 1:48 = 1:2,304. To get a "c" next that would be 1:48 x 1:2,304 = 1:110,592. If they got one letter out of place that would mean they would have to start over. The odds of a monkey typing just the title "Encyclopedia Britannica" is 1 chance in 4.7x10³⁸! That would be equivalent to 1 monkey on every square foot of the earth, stacked 77 miles high, typing once a second for 20 billion years!

Randomly type the phrase "encyclopedia britannica" with 48 key keyboard.

• 48²³=4.7x10³⁸.
• 1:470,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (470 undecillion) chance.
• 630,000,000,000,000,000 seconds in 20 billion year old universe.
• 740,000,000,000,000,000,000 (740 quintillion) monkeys required at 1 keystroke per second for 20 billion years.
• Odds are that only ONE monkey will get it right.
• Surface are of earth 5,500,000,000,000,000 ft².
• With one monkey per ft² they would be stacked 135,000 monkeys high.
• If your monkeys are 3 ft tall while sitting you would have monkeys stacked 77 miles high!

The problem with comparing monkeys typing to a cell occurring from nothing is that the keyboards already have a language and we already know how to read that language. What if one of those monkeys were typing and finally got the phrase "encyclopedia britannica" and handed it to someone that only speaks Chinese? It would be useless to them. A cell has massive amounts of DNA that it already knows how to read, decode, and re-encode. All the information in the world does no good if no one can understand it. Genetic mutations are much more dangerous than typing since one wrong change can be fatal. A more likely scenario would be that if a monkey typed the wrong key that the typewriter would kill him. Louis Pasteur used empirical science to form the law of Biogenesis that states "all life is from life."

One of the worlds largest super-computer right now (maybe even the largest) is not just one computer but a collection of computers of thousands of users processing data packets for a organization called SETI. They use radio telescopes and listen for information from outer space to look for a repeating or complex signal from broadcasts from another planet. What would happen if they finally got a packet that was a transmission of increasing numbers? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, ..... and so on. The next day the news papers would all read "INTELLIGENT LIFE FOUND ON ANOTHER PLANET." Why does the secular world seek intelligence in simple radio signals, yet look at something as complex as a cell, DNA, or your brain and see only random unorganized chaos that happened by chance?