A cool theory on the creation of life:

Damn my brain for not remembering where I heard this analogy. It was referring to the idea of life spontaneously happened on earth. I am loosely paraphrasing this but this fits my personal view that life on earth was seeded, or purposely engineered - whether it be by a god, an alien race, or an asteroid carrying alien bacteria from a distant far-off place....


Some say that life evolved out of a primordial soup of chemicals which happened to mix and combine in such a way that they were able to replicate and evolve into all life as we know it.

So, according to this theory, if the world was a giant pile of auto parts with oceans of oil then eventually, over a few billion years the parts would align and assemble themselves into an operating and fully tuned BMW Z3 convertible.

All systems in nature will degrade over time and eventually break down. Oceans dry up, mountains are ground and worn into canyons, whole continents disappear and are plowed under tectonic plates. Life is the exception. When all systems are breaking down under the rules of nature, life is flourishing, evolving and adapting.

Ah yes, the ol' argument from incredulity.

Actually the "primordial soup" theory, if applied to the oil and auto parts scenario, would mean that the oil's chemical structure would change into longer and odder chains of hydrocarbon molecules due to solar exposure, heat, and electricity. These chains of molecules stick together, becoming clumps of tar. Some of these tar clumps stick to the frames of the automobiles. The steel and rubber of the auto parts breaks down, adding their chemical signature to the tar-clumps, some of which might form crusts of iron oxide...

The "tornado makes an airplane" line of thinking (yes, others have come up with the same outlook) assumes that life happened in an instant, and that there's some magical "spark" that made life special. Nope. The earliest "life" was simply noncellular strands of protiens that split and stretched and reassembled themselves. Life is the product of a chemical reaction.

And your attempt to apply the second law of thermodynamics is inapplicable. New oceans are formed as old ones dry. New mountains and continents rise as plate tectonics slide across the mantle. organisms die, and new organisms are born. Some species go extinct, others speciate.

reply to post by Arizonee

So, according to this theory, if the world was a giant pile of auto parts with oceans of oil then eventually, over a few billion years the parts would align and assemble themselves into an operating and fully tuned BMW Z3 convertible.

The makings of Z3s are not self-organizing, self-replicating, and evloving. The makings of cells(dna, rna) are. Not everything has this property, cars obviously don't, and neither do mountains, life does, that's what makes it special.

All systems in nature will degrade over time and eventually break down. Oceans dry up, mountains are ground and worn into canyons, whole continents disappear and are plowed under tectonic plates. Life is the exception. When all systems are breaking down under the rules of nature, life is flourishing, evolving and adapting.

False. After the big bang the universe was unorganized. Since then things have organized into planets, solar systems, galaxies, life, ecosystems, intelligent life and now intelligent machines. Life is different from inanimate objects like mountains, that is what makes it life. And either way, all you're suggesting is that life started somewhere other than earth, not that it started by magic. No matter where it started, it would have been the exception. You've invented the problem that everything degrades except life, and then instead of answering it you just moved the source of life off earth. No matter what planet it started on it would have to have some special properties, and z3s wouldnt be spontaneously popping up there either.

Yes BMW Z3 convertibles self-assemble. We're just one link in a chain of reactions that make it possible. If we were all gone and an observer cared to ignore the processes, it would appear those Z3's just pop up all on their own with no good explanation.

Don't forget the chamber full of monkeys, randomly slamming away at keyboards ... eventually producing Shakespeare's classic work... theoretically.

Such randomness in the universe is illusory, there is a framework behind it all... at least that's how it appears to me.