Subject: Abiogenesis and the Second Law: Evolution’s Death Blow

Isaiah 43:7 “Everyone who is called by My name, whom I have created for My glory. I have formed him, yes, I have made him.”

Dr. Harold Blum received his PhD from Harvard Medical School and spent much of his life working in photobiology, as he tried to find treatments to eradicate cancer. He was a leading voice in evolutionary biology, but in 1950 he wrote the book ‘Time’s Arrow and Evolution’, where he explained the irreconcilable problem that organic evolution simply cannot overcome: it’s the HYPERLINK “http://www.eoht.info/page/Second+law+of+thermodynamics” \t “_self” second law of thermodynamics. A brief reminder: the second law of thermodynamics tells us that in this world (and the universe as a whole), life and everything in it always moves toward states of breaking down and disorder, never towards states of complexity and order. The riddle he tried to solve was ‘Where did life’s motor come from, that keeps living systems (like you and me) from succumbing to the second law of thermodynamics?

Dr. Blum agrees with creation scientists, that evolution cannot account for how living systems operate: “How, when no life existed, did substances come into being, which today are absolutely essential to living systems, yet which can only be formed by these systems? Until this fundamental contradiction is thoroughly cleared up and harmonized, creationists are abundantly justified in insisting that evolution as a universal principle is not only unproved but statistically almost impossible!”

What Dr. Blum is saying is that if living systems were to originate from nonliving systems, this idea of ‘abiogenesis’, the second law of thermodynamics demands that free energy had to be supplied. And free energy can only be supplied to a system by a motor that can extract energy from the environment for that living system to use, so that it can counteract the decaying effects of the second law. As he says “The source of this free energy is a fundamental problem we must eventually face… “

The fundamental problem for Dr. Blum, and all proponents of evolution (including Bill Nye), is how does one get a metabolic motor to support life before life was present to build the motor? My evolutionist friends claim this ‘motor’ had to have arisen through an unguided, chance event in a nonliving medium by chemical evolution.

Now, of course, the argument turns to ‘well, we just need billions of years, and anything is possible’. Dr. Blum can be appreciated for his scientific honesty – here’s his response: ‘I think if I were rewriting this chapter (on the origin of life) completely, I should want to change the emphasis. I should want to play down still more the importance of the great amount of time available for highly improbable events to occur. One may take the view that the greater the time elapsed the greater should be the approach to equilibrium, the most probable state, and it seems that this ought to take precedence in our thinking over the idea that time provides the possibility for the occurrence of the highly improbable.’

Dr. Blum is saying that huge spans of time will bring randomness and not unlikely synthesis such as my Darwinian evolutionist friends claim. So, to put it bluntly, with an infinite of time you get infinite randomness, a complete lack of order.

There is an obvious solution to where this complex motor came from, that can synthesize free energy and allow living systems to maintain their order in the midst of a Second Law that wants to break them down. It’s in our Scripture verse for this week. The God of the Bible says it simply in Isaiah 43:7 – “It was Me.”
Sounds like the most reasonable explanation for the evidence we have today.