Thread by @MidbellSoul

The enigma at the Origin of Life: an utterly unsolvable problem for atheism

[Thread]

Abiogenesis, the word for dead matter first forming into living things, is taken as a staple in the atheist world. Its just something that “naturally happens”

But how natural is it, really?

The more you dig into the question, the more you realize atheism runs into an ironic problem: the very act of abiogenesis necessitates God

Let me explain. There are a few leading theories on the origin of life, with the ‘RNA World’ as the most widely accepted. In this
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hypothesis, it’s stated that strands of RNA were able to self assemble in prebiotic conditions, via random chemical reactions paired with heat, UV beams, lightning, and other physical processes. And that eventually, a strand who’s folded configuration was able to reproduce
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itself began the first step of life. There are too many issues to list with this, but they arent the focus of this thread

So, I’ll briefly list out what we’re going to ignore and give to the atheist, just to bolster their argument before exposing the underlying problem in it
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We’re going to ignore that:
RNA bonds are thermodynamically unstable in water

RNA has never been shown to form spontaneously

the sugars to even construct its backbone don’t link to bases without enzymes

even *human engineered* ribozymes have never been able to self-replicate
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no one knows where the energy needed for these reactions came from

we haven’t even been able to form (in laboratories) the 4 nucleotide bases in RNA that supposedly formed on their own

lab synthesized molecules always form racemic mixtures while life is selectively chiral
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And many, many more *fatal* issues that cant all be listed. We’re going to ignore them and pretend like they don’t exist

Even with that, there is a crucial, unsolvable problem: the information stored in the RNA code

Before getting into what I mean, it must be understood that
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RNA (and DNA) function as a digital code in species. The sequence of the 4 bases along the strand are crucial to the folding and function of the RNA. This sequence is the information in the strand, and it’s not determined by chemical processes. In fact the reason why RNA is so
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good at storing information is that it doesn’t care which bases come next in the strand. So AAA is just as probable as AGC, and as AUU, GCU, UUU, etc (with minor exceptions)

What this means is the information stored is NOT based in chemistry or biology. The sequence isn’t
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tugged by physical forces to arrange a certain way; its arrangement is based purely on information

So the big question is this: what’re the odds that an RNA strand will randomly form a sequence that allows it to self-replicate and begin life? Considering we’ve never found a
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self-replicating RNA, well have to make yet again another exception for the atheist and pretend we have

The best *man-made* ribozyme (tC19Z) has been shown to add 27 bases to an existing template. It cant produce itself, but we’ll pretend it can. We’ll use it as an example,
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though a real one would be much more complex, as it would need to somehow read and replicate its entire length. If its even 1 base short of its full sequence, it couldn’t make an exact copy and would lose its function. But to move forward, we’ll pretend the current one works
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tC19Z is 198 bases long, and since its sequence is purely information, there is no chemical/physical law to guide it. It must come about randomly in the primordial earth

So what’re the odds that out of the 4 options for bases, they arrange naturally to form this
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theoretical self-replicating RNA?

The odds are 1 out of 4^198, or 1 out of 1.6x10^119 options

For reference, there are 10^78 atoms in the entire universe, and this number is more than a trecedilion (40 zeros) times bigger than that. Its unimaginably large, and the chance
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of the sequence arranging randomly is essentially 0

But surely the academics and researchers have a solution to this, right? Nope, they’re still busy trying to prove ribozymes can self-replicate, no one has even *attempted* to address the information problem

What if we had
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enough time, couldnt it form? Nope, not only is the universe far too young to do this, but time is actually the enemy in this case

James Tour, a world renown synthetic organic chemist, with over 93000 citations and awarded scientist of the year (2013) discusses the time issue
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So what does all this mean? It means the true foundation of life is information—it is part and parcel what allows life to exist

There isn’t a single example of information forming itself, it’s ALWAYS the product of intelligence, a mind, and not blind processes

For example
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computer code, written text, sheet music, etc. All of these are products of a mind

So if the *first* self-replicating molecule requires an immensely sophisticated code, how can we assume it arises via evolution when there’s nothing to even evolve yet?
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Im not saying the origin of life came down from the heavens on a golden platter. I’m saying that the very act of abiogenesis, if it happened, NECESSITATES an intelligence to provide the information in the code

Otherwise, and even while ignoring the issues mentioned above,
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life would not have existed. The information in the genetic code must come before biology, not after it

This is also why the Fermi Paradox isn’t really a paradox at all. It’s a calculation that states there’s more than enough time and earth-like planets in the universe for
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it to be teeming with life right now. Yet there’s nothing but silence. This is because the current literature *assumes* that life occurs naturally, that it doesn’t depend on an intelligent designer. When we understand this in light of the information problem, it makes
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sense there is no other observable life. It’s not a natural occurrence

It’s only been made to seem that way by misleading articles, science popularizers, and biased text books. Here’s James Tour again speaking about origin of life research and its underlying facade
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All in all, the general public has been lied to about the origin of life. We’re no where near even assuming it arose via natural, blind processes, and we never will be

The best thing to do, then, is to make an ‘inference to the best explanation,’ a widely used reasoning in
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the sciences

-There must be information in even the simplest self-replicating molecules

-information is a product of intelligence

-therefore, the best explanation is that intelligence is the cause of information in self-replicating molecules

Whether you want to call it God
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or aliens (which would just push the problem back a step without solving it), it must be admitted that there is a mindful and intelligent cause to life

I’ve run out of tweets in this thread, so I’ll end it there :)

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