In a BreakPoint radio commentary, Eric Metaxas shows again why he’s among the drollest observers of evolutionary theory and its shortcomings:

There’s an old story about a chemist, a physicist, and an economist stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat but a can of soup. Puzzling over how to open the can, the chemist says, “Let’s heat the can until it swells and bursts from the buildup of gases.” “No, no,” says the physicist, “let’s throw it off that cliff with just enough kinetic energy to split it open on the rocks below.” The economist, after thinking a moment says, “Assume a can opener.”

There’s more than one trade that deals in assumptions. The way Darwinists approach the origin of life is a lot like that economist’s idea for opening the can. The Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection explains everything about life, we’re told — except how it began. “Assume a self-replicating cell containing information in the form of genetic code,” Darwinists are forced to say. Well, fine. But where did that little miracle come from?

The can opener is priceless. Metaxas is referring to our story here about a discovery of fossil stromatolites in Greenland that pushes back the origin of life substantially (“Greenland Fossils, Earth’s Oldest, Pose an Evolutionary Dilemma“).

“Stromatolites” may sound like something your doctor would diagnose, but they’re actually biological rocks formed by colonies of microbes that live in shallow water. If you visit the Bahamas today, you can see living stromatolites.

What’s so special about them? Well, they appear in rocks most scientists date to 220 million years older than the oldest fossils, which pushes the supposed date for the origin of life back to 3.7 billion years ago.

This, admits the New York Times, “complicate[s] the story of evolution of early life from chemicals…” No kidding!

In 3.7 billion years, stromatolites haven’t done a lot of evolving.

Chemical evolution needs to have kick-started the history of life pretty much at the first opportunity on the early Earth:

These life forms came into existence virtually overnight, writes David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views. “[G]enetic code, proteins, photosynthesis, the works.”

This appearance of fully-developed life forms so early in the fossil record led Dr. Abigail Allwood of Caltech to remark that “life [must not be] a fussy, reluctant and unlikely thing.” Rather, “[i]t will emerge whenever there’s an opportunity.”

Pardon me? If life occurs so spontaneously and predictably even under the harshest conditions, then it should be popping up all over the place! Yet scientists still cannot come close to producing even a single cell from raw chemicals in the lab.

Dr. Stephen Meyer explains in his book Signature in the Cell why this may be Darwinism’s Achilles heel. In order to begin evolution by natural selection, you need a self-replicating unit. But the cell and its DNA blueprint are too complicated by far to have arisen through chance chemical reactions. The odds of even a single protein forming by accident are astronomical.

Yes, the problem here is that evolution faces a three-way Catch-22. If life sparks itself into existence so readily, why is there no evidence of multiple origins here on Earth? Instead we have one genetic code shared by all living creatures and going back to the first life, demonstrating a single origin. This is not to mention the great array of worlds in the cosmos beyond, apparently empty of intelligent life. If that is a snap too, why are the intelligent aliens keeping such a low profile?

On other hand, if life and intelligent life in particular face hurdles of the kind that ID researchers say they do, then that is suggestive of purpose, design, in life’s origins, needed to overcome the hurdles.

Oh so you want to say that chemical and biological origins are not super easy, not super hard, just kind of…medium hard? But then why did life snap into existence so quickly on our planet? Assume a can opener, perhaps.

Photo: Stromatolites, Highborne Cay, Bahamas, by Vincent Poirier (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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