The Blog

Many evolutionists and creationists speak as if they know, beyond any doubt, how the first life came into existence.

Both, of course, cannot be right. If one is right, one is wrong.

So how can we discover who is right?

The following fact is obvious and often overlooked: no human observed the origin of the first life.

The emergence of the first life on earth was a one-time, unrepeatable occurrence. No one was present to see it—neither evolutionists nor creationists were there, and we certainly cannot travel back in time in order to directly observe whether the origin of first life arose by natural laws or intelligent intervention.

That raises an important question: if we cannot directly observe the past, then what scientific principles can we use to help us discover what caused the first life?

We must the same principles that are utilized every day in our criminal justice system—forensic principles. In other words, the origin of life is a forensic question that requires us to piece together evidence much like detectives piece together evidence from a murder.

Detectives cannot go back in time and witness the murder again. Neither can they revive the victim and go to the laboratory to conduct some type of experiment that will allow them to observe and repeat the crime over and over again. Instead, they must utilize the principles of forensic science to discover what really happened.

The central principle in forensic science is the Principle of Uniformity, which holds that causes in the past were like the causes that occur today.

In other words, by the Principle of Uniformity, we assume that the world worked in the past just like it works today, especially when comes to causes.

If natural laws can do the job today, then the Principle of Uniformity would lead us to conclude natural laws could do the job in the past.

Let us consider the Grand Canyon.

What causes it? Did anyone see it form? No, but by the Principle of Uniformity, we can conclude that natural processes, particularly water erosion, were responsible for the formation of the Grand Canyon.

We can conclude this confidently, even though we were not there to see it happen, because we can observe these natural process create canyons today.

We see this in nature when we observe water’s effect on a land mass.

We can even go into a laboratory and repeatedly pour water in the middle of a mass of dirt, and we will always see a canyon.

In the same way, when we look at the first one-celled life, the Principle of Uniformity tells us that only intelligent cause could assemble the equivalent of 1,000 encyclopedias.

Even with the Principle of Uniformity, why then do Darwinists come to the conclusion that the first life generated spontaneously from nonliving chemicals without intelligent intervention?