Life Can't Start Itself: Why the Origin of Life Points to a Creator

The Question Science Has Not Answered

Textbooks explain how life changes once it exists: how species adapt, how genes mutate, how populations evolve. What they cannot yet explain is how the first living cell came to exist at all. How did a world of rocks, water and simple chemicals produce something that could copy itself, read a genetic code and build its own machinery?

That is the origin-of-life problem, and it is one of the largest unsolved questions in science. It is not a fringe topic. It is studied in well-funded laboratories at Harvard, Cambridge, Manchester and elsewhere, by serious chemists who are open about how much they do not know. Jack Szostak, a Nobel laureate and one of the leading researchers in the field, says plainly of some of the central steps that they have not been solved. Another leading chemist, John Sutherland, has made real progress on parts of the puzzle, and still the whole picture is far from complete.

This article’s thesis is that the origin of life remains a genuine mystery, that even its most distinguished researchers say so, and that this leaves reasonable room for believers to see a Creator’s hand in it. The mystery is not a sign that science has failed. It is a sign that the question is deep, and honest scientists treat it that way.