Abiogenesis Woes — Harvard to the Rescue

It seems that Harvard University has decided to jump into the origins of life fray. One might ask: Why now; what is their motivation? Are they simply joining in on an area of promising and fruitful research, like biotechnology? No. According to this article, "The project begins with an admission that some mysteries about life's origins cannot be explained."

The question of how the first life-forms originated (abiogenesis) has proven to be an intractable problem for naturalistic scientists. As John Horgan, senior writer for Scientific American, has said:

If I were a creationist, I would cease attacking the theory of evolution — which is so well supported by the fossil record [that's a howler] — and focus instead on the origin of life. This is by far the weakest strut of the chassis of modern biology. The origin of life is a science writer's dream. It abounds with exotic scientists and exotic theories, which are never entirely abandoned or accepted, but merely go in and out of fashion.

So, given this problematic area of life-sciences, what hope of success does Harvard bring to the table? Well, according to David R. Liu, professor of chemical biology:

My expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention.

Wow! This seems a rather brash claim in light of the fruitless work by all other institutions dedicated to this problem over the past several decades. It's also the most refreshing admission of bias that I've seen in awhile. He's convinced before he even begins that he will find a purely natural process — a "simple" one no less — by which raw chemicals may be assembled into structures as complex as machines and factories. But if one believes that God does not exist, or that He does not intervene in His creation, then a mechanistic process is what one MUST find.

If Harvard ultimately fails to make a meaningful contribution to this field, should we suppose that they will concede the possibility of a designer? Not a chance, unless Intelligent Design theorists manage to break the stranglehold that methodological naturalism has on the biological sciences. If they are unable to identify, much less demonstrate, the chemical pathways necessary for deriving self-replicating life, I expect that no concessions will be made (on the record) to Intelligent Design. In place of evidence will come a story proposing, at the highest level of abstraction, how molecules managed to assemble into amoeba. But the devil's in the details. If some underlying mechanism cannot be identified, then the story remains a fairytale.

But not to worry, there'll always be another decade just around the corner bursting with the promise of science and the power of nature to forestall any suspicions that the theory of evolution may be falsified.