Abiogenesis, a Greek mouthful for “the origin of life,” is according to Wikipedia, “the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter.”
The lack of critical qualification at the outset is startling: non-living matter’s alleged once-upon-a-time issuance in life is asserted as a fact, not a hypothesis. That is, the bald assertion comes first, followed by the admission of the hypothetical nature of the whole business:
While the details of this process are still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but a gradual process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Although the occurrence of abiogenesis is uncontroversial among scientists, there is no single, generally accepted model for the origin of life, and this article presents several principles and hypotheses for how abiogenesis could have occurred.
So the devilish details are unknown and there’s no single, generally accepted model for abiogenesis, yet some version of it must be true. That’s the “prevailing hypothesis.” Belief in its having occurred is “uncontroversial among scientists.”
That is to say, abiogenesis is a dogma, not an empirically verified fact. It is a sad commentary on the state of science that a theory with nothing going for it except the culturally regnant naturalistic prejudice is “uncontroversial.”
And by nothing, I mean . . . nothing. For an entertaining retailing of the dues the dogmatists pay for their dogmatism, I cannot recommend too enthusiastically Rice University Professor of Chemistry James Tour‘s lively video presentation (sponsored by The Discovery Institute) available on EvolutionNews.
Professor Tour’s massive case against “life from non-life” gives one an idea of the “integrated chemical complexity” that led the late philosopher (and long-time atheist) Antony Flew (not to be confused with Anthony Flood) to drop his profession of atheism for deism.
“Show me the chemistry!,” Tour demands. So did Flew, but he went away empty-handed.
It doesn’t exist.
The evidence for the existence of God—the God of the Bible, not Flew’s deistic deus—lies in (among many other aspects of creation) scientific inquiry itself, the fit of intelligibility and intelligence. It’s inexplicable apart from the worldview expressed in the Bible. The demonstrated folly of research programs for testing the abiogenesis “hypothesis”—or the dogma masquerading as one—is, at best, a suasive consideration for Christian theism.
So, again, set aside a couple of minutes for the beginning of James Tour’s pedagogical tour de force (sorry!). I defy you not to stay for the whole hour.