Doubt
“I just can’t believe or accept the idea that something as vibrant and complex as life just occurred by chance.” I have often heard this response when someone is asked as to why they believe in a creator with intention.
You CAN believe and accept the idea that something as vibrant and complex as life occurred by chance. I have been able to do it without difficulty and perhaps I can assist you in doing the same.
Of course if you do not want to believe or accept that idea there is no point in reading further as there is nothing I can say or do that will change your mind. If, on the other hand, you are open to examining your beliefs and the reasons you hold them, please continue.
I am going to assume that you are a person of average or better intelligence, who has perused the work of several experts in various scientific fields. You have finally conceded that yes, it does appear that the universe is, at a minimum, somewhat less than 14 billion years old. You have also had to admit, as has the Pope himself, that evolution by natural selection is the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life as we see it on our planet.
While counter-intuitive, it is now obvious that simple organisms can and do evolve into more complex organisms by small incremental changes over time spans that we are unable to appreciate subjectively. Indeed, the principles at work are so well understood and confirmed that, in hindsight, it seems amazing that it took so long to recognize and appreciate it.
With my reader now firmly in mind I submit, with as much humility as I can manage, some thoughts on this cosmic matter and, hopefully, persuade a shift in perspective.
The question I wish to address is “How did life really begin and was it a chance event?”
Of course once life begins, chance does not play much of a role in its persistence. As any evolutionary biologist will affirm, the wonders evolution produces are owing to known processes that are elegantly deterministic, the very opposite of chance occurrences.
No one suggests that a eukaryotic cell with an intact membrane enclosing its incredibly complex organic chemical factory just fell together one day. No, whatever structure was first, it had to be very much more primitive, and preceded the first eukaryotic cell by about 2 billion years. Multicellular organisms took another billion years to appear.
So what was the first ‘thing’ that was thrown together by chance and gave rise to starfish, parrots, beetles, bacteria and pomegranates? Hypotheses abound but a consensus is yet to be developed. We know it happened when there was no free oxygen, that it occurred in water, that there was a lot of electrical and radiation violence. We know that the first ‘thing’ was capable of causing another identical ‘thing’ by acting as a template or effecting the descendant’s organization in some other fashion.
And we know it only had to happen once.
Very improbable it is true but nevertheless not impossible. My intention now will be to attempt to somehow quantify this probability so that a more objective perspective can emerge.
I propose a random planet. Certain features as to temperature, chemical distribution, presence of liquid and other considerations necessary to support life are known to be rare. While bases other than water and carbon can provide a large range of complex compounds, I will assume carbon based life only just to be as conservative as I can. Let us assume that a life-possible-planet occurs with a frequency of 1 in 10 million. You will note that our solar system has 2 life-possible-planets (Earth and Mars) in a sample of nine and I only wish to avoid the charge of confirmation bias in my assumptions.
Let us further assume that one out of a billion of these life-possible-planets will give rise to a life creating event at least once given a period of a billion years to do so. Another wildly speculative assumption, but I claim it satisfies the requirement of being very improbable, at least to the extent that the conclusion reached has some merit.
How many planets would have to be created in order to achieve something like certainty of at least one creating proto-life? (given a billion years)
10 X 106 X 109 = 1016 or 10,000,000,000,000,000 planets.
How many planets are there? I am going to estimate a universe-wide average of one planet per sun. I do not believe this is too generous as satellites appear to be quite common. Our sun has 9 planets, Jupiter has 67 moons.
Our galaxy has about 500 billion stars, our nearest neighbor Andromeda has about twice that number, about a trillion. Let us assume an average of 500 billion stars (or planets) per galaxy. A conservative estimate for the number of galaxies in our universe is 100 billion. Doing the math we have
500X109 X 100X109 = 5X1022 planets.
Dividing what we have by what we need we find that we have 5 million times the number of planets that would be required to ensure life would begin somewhere. And do not forget we postulated one billion years while our universe has provided ten times that in planet time.
I think it is fair to conclude that, contrary to it being difficult to believe or accept the chance origin of life, it would be positively obstinate to doubt it.