This week we take one of the most difficult parts of our journey; the leap from lifelessness to life.  Could there really be that much luck in the universe or is this the hand of intelligence at work? “Life is one of the strangest phenomena known.  In my opinion it shows that the universe is capable of almost anything.  Yet it amazes me that we know so much about how the universe began many billions of years ago, but we have yet to discover how life itself began.  The most likely explanation is probably that we are an accident.  Just by chance, some molecules bumped into each other at random, until finally one formed that could copy itself.  Then began the slow process of evolution that led to all the extraordinary diversity of life on earth.  Life seems to be simply what matter does given the right conditions and enough time.”  Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking: The Story of Everything, Discovery Channel “Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.”   Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981) In my book Signature in the Cell, I perform updated calculations of the probability of the origin of even a single functional protein or corresponding functional gene (the section of a DNA molecule that directs the synthesis of a particular protein) by chance alone…I show that the probability of producing even a single functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance alone in a prebiotic environment stands at no better than a “vanishingly small” 1 chance in 10^164, and inconceivably small probability.  Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer, 2021  Page 175 “…Tompa and Rose have demonstrated mathematically that even having all the requisite parts for a cell will not ensure that those ingredients will self-organize into a living system.  Instead, the cell, like the individual genes or proteins, faces an extreme combinational problem.  Tompa and Rose calculate, building on the work of protein scientist Cyrus Levinthal, that there are a whopping 10^79,000,000,000 different ways of combining just the proteins in a relatively simple unicellular yeast.  That number only grows exponentially larger when biologists attempt to calculate the number of possible ways of combining all the proteins and all the other large molecular components necessary for that one-celled organism, including DNA and RNA molecules, ribosomes, lipids and glycolipid molecules, and others.”  Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer, 2021  Page 291 “Nevertheless, it may be that the origin of life is not the only major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck, anthropically justified.  For example, my colleague, Mark Ridley in Mendel’s Demon…has suggested that the origin of the eukaryotic cell (our kind of cell, with a nucleus and various other complicated features such as mitochondria, which are not present in bacteria) was an even more momentous, difficult and statistically improbable step than the origin of life.  The origin of consciousness might be another major gap whose bridging was of the same order of improbability.  One-off events like this might be explained by the anthropic principle, along the following lines.  There are billions of planets that have developed life at the level of bacteria…Natural selection works because it is a cumulative one-way street to improvement.  It needs some luck to get it started, and the ‘billions of planets’ anthropic principle grants it that

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