On “How life works” by Alex Williams

I recently have read an article in www.creation.com that saddened me after uplifting my spirits initially with its articulate and scientific – like style. The opening statement of How life works by Alex Williams is eloquent and bold. This is a material created by a scholar with many years of natural sciences and theological training and research experience. His belief in God and the wholly scriptures that prove His existence, His plan and the purpose of His design appear to be indestructible. 

“Life is not a naturalistic phenomenon with unlimited evolutionary potential as Darwin proposed. It is intelligently designed, ruled by immutable laws, and survives only because it has a built-in facilitated variation mechanism for continually adapting to internal and external challenges and changes.” the author statement is and he attempts to prove it using Louis Pasteur’s law of biogenesis, Professor Michael Polanyi’s principle of life’s irreducible structure. He gives some credit to Charles Darwin who “was correct in proposing that the species we see around us today have arisen via the mechanism of natural selection of natural variation, but he was wrong in extrapolating it to all life”. “All life” is extraordinarily large and complex matter to grasp and formulate even for Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species. It is also an amazingly tough undertaking to do it in a single article. It is also insulting to God, the more sophisticated reader and it is manipulative to the less sophisticated one.

A week after reading the article something isn’t feeling right. So, I decided to write a comment. I am not a scholar, nor did I dedicate years of my life to research like Mr. Alex Williams. I am not an atheist, nor am I a true believer like him. My comments are entirely my own point of view on the topic and merely thoughts of a laic.

Per Mr. Williams, Louis Pasteur “formulated a law of biogenesis—that life comes from life—a universal principle that has stood the test of time.” He continues that “Origin-of-life researchers continue to look for means of abiogenesis (life from non-life) but without success.” I believe that it is an incorrect statement.

It isn’t odd that “origin-of-life researchers continue to look for means of abiogenesis but without success.” If law of biogenesis is a universal principle that has stood the test of time, inevitably there should be a law of abiogenesis if God Himself has used abiogenesis to bring Adam into existence. But, perhaps, the origin-of-life researchers continue to struggle for means of abiogenesis without success because the time isn’t right yet for God to reveal the knowledge about this form of creation. Or, perhaps, there is a simpler explanation - such principle doesn’t exist at all.

The Book of Genesis provides a proof that God has used biogenesis to create Adam. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” Gen. 1.26 . Evidently God created the heaven and the earth, the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, the cattle, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth prior to creating Adam.

Even the author of the article as a scientist will not be so ignorant to disagree that when God created Adam “out of earth”, that this same earth was not already been inhabited with recently created tiny forms of life. As Mr. Williams states that “life consists mostly of architecture and machinery made from long-chain molecules having a ‘backbone’ of carbon atoms tightly linked together, with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur attached along the sides”. Initially God created these “long-chain molecules” and they were in the earth already before He created Adam. The creation of the microorganisms predates the creation of Adam as the Book of Genesis tells us. Adam was the last and the greatest creation of God.

Per Wikipedia “Microorganisms live in all parts of the biosphere where there is liquid water, including soil, hot springs, on the ocean floor, high in the atmosphere and deep inside rocks within the Earth's crust.” Therefore, as descendants of Adam and Eve we all must be “engineered” by using the same molecular structure and we must be following the same principles an intelligent designer imprinted as a coded information even in the simplest unicellular microorganisms found in the soil.  

In “Compartments, modules and signals” the author of the article is giving an example with a planarian flatworm - a free-living freshwater creature with two eyespots at one end and a feeding tube at the other end. When cut in half, each of the two halves normally regenerates a complete organism. However, when the beta-catenin signaling system is blocked, the head end regenerates another head and the tail end regenerates another tail.

The conclusion of the article is that “Despite life’s functional beauty, selection depletes gene pools and mutations degrade genomes, and extinction is coming on a time scale of only thousands, not billions, of years. Intelligent design plus rapid extinction point clearly to recent Creation and Fall, as the Bible tells us.”

What is insulting to the intelligence is the use of the argument “that the special structure of life’s machine-like components cannot be explained by (or reduced to) the properties of the atoms and molecules they are made of; something else is required.” The exertion until the whole the article, I realized by the end of it, is to prove the notion that because life is so complicated and follows certain laws to that day, the only possibility for it to exist is the intelligent design.

When watching the picture of the planarian flatworm cut in two in the article, I can’t really remove myself from the feeling that “all life” is a poorly designed experiment by a scientist with questionable ethics. Why would God create life and “program” it with a wrong code? Is it for all life to self-destruct? God should be wiser and greater that that. Perhaps all life has a reason beyond self-destruction or destruction by the Creator. If we exist by design, maybe we will understand the idea behind the design if we, as creators ourselves, are able to develop our own ethics to the level of Original designer’s ethics.