[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
Before I start the main part of this post I'd just like to say a little something about where I'm coming from. I have been lurking this forum for a little while now and have made a couple of posts but this is my first post of any significant content.

I am a Christian and am currently an engineering student in Sheffield, England. I would like to think that in general I'm a logical person and up to now I have had no major problems with accepting Christianity as logical. There are certain aspects that I'm unsure of but there have been other things I have experienced/seen happen that have made it seem illogical not to believe.

Anyway, enough about me and onto what I wanted to post about. I'm obviously familiar with the theory of evolution and how it postures that life evolved from single celled organisms and eventually led to what we have now (this is an area I am actually slightly unsure of what I think/believe but for now I'd rather it wasn't too involved in this thread). What I don't know so much about is an atheist viewpoint on how the very first life form was created.

From what I have read (admittedly a lot of biased material, but all with seemingly strong references) it seems that the chance of life occuring spontaneously is all but zero. There is the overused analogy of it being as likely as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a boeing 747 but from what I know that doesn't seem absurd. Life is immensely complex, far more so than a 747, requiring as many as 200 proteins each made up of a string of 100+ amino acids for even the simplest form of life.

What then is the atheist explanation for life on Earth? The only theory I've ever heard is panspermia which frankly seems slightly off the wall and in any case just shifts the problem to somewhere else in the universe. If you could give me any further insight as to current theories and any evidence for them that would be greatly appreciated.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thats a terrible analogy, first off, although its not your fault for using it. Its very popular. Honestly, I don't think anyone, currently, is in a good position to postulate what the odds of the first life coming together randomly were. A few majors reasons for this: We don't REALLY know what conditions on Earth were like, then, and we don't really know what the first life form was. If the first life-form was an extremely simple version of RNA, or even simpler, some sort of silicon or inorganic replicator, then obviously the odds of this randomly occurring increase greatly. If the world just happened to be in a state that facilitated exactly this sort of random occurrence, our odds go way up again. I don't know very much about the actual science or data of abiogenesis (although I am under the assumption that there isn't much of it to know about) but, strictly logically speaking, the metaphor of a tornado in a junkyard is about as arbitrary as me saying the odds were about the same as flipping a coin and getting heads. The mathematics used to support the tornado metaphor are based on a whole host of assertions that have no support.

If the history of evolutionary discovery has taught us anything, the likely right answer is that some extremely gradual, slow process guided the development of the first life, in many stages that were themselves not extremely unlikely, possibly over millions of trials in which the failures were excluded. All of this is, of course, conjecture on my part.