The study of living matter is at the center of all current scientific efforts. Recent triumphs include the cloning of Dolly the sheep and acquisition of the complete sequence of three billion nucleotides of the human chromosomes.² But, strangely, life itself is not the object of much study. Scientists seem to take the existence of life for granted.

Suppose we take apart living matter, and then recombine the isolated components. The work will yield an impressive collection of inert substances— but not life. So far, science has not created living matter in the laboratory.

What is the Origin of Life?

More than 100 years ago Louis Pasteur and others proved the folly of abiogenesis—the spontaneous transformation of non-living matter into living organisms. Nevertheless, scientists generally accept the concept that life developed abiologically on a primordial Earth and conveniently assert that conditions on a “primordial world” were conducive to generate life spontaneously.

Others theorize that perhaps life was imported to Earth from outer space. But while Earth is covered with millions of different species of organisms, there is no evidence of life anywhere in the solar system. The last logical option for the origin of life is creation by a supernatural Creator. But science, in its attempt to explain everything by natural laws, rejects the creation option as being outside the scientific realm.

What is Life?

The term life has different meanings, depending on whether it refers to an organism, an organ, or a cell. Survival of a transplanted liver, kidney, or heart means something quite different from human “life.” All manifestations of life depend on living cells, the most fundamental units of living matter. When a live cell is taken apart, a collection of very complex, but lifeless sub-cellular structures remain: membranes, nuclei, mitochondria, ribosomes, etc.

Structurally, living matter is composed of a combination of water and of large, fragile, lifeless molecules, proteins, polysaccharides, nucleic acids, and lipids. Water serves as the medium in which all chemical changes occur. Proteins and lipids are the principal structural components of cells. Proteins also control all chemical changes. Without chemical changes, life cannot exist. How proteins interact with chemical changes is central to understanding the chemical basis of life.

The Language of Proteins

Proteins come in thousands of different forms, each with unique chemical and physical properties. This diversity is due to their size: Each protein can contain hundreds of amino acids, and there are 20 different amino acids. What each protein is capable of doing depends on the order in which its amino acids are linked. This is like language, in which the meaning of words depends on the sequences of letters. The millions of different proteins represent but a tiny fraction of all possible combinations of amino acids.3

When words are misspelled or misplaced, their meaning is garbled or lost. Likewise, for proteins to function properly, their amino acids must follow one another in the correct order. The results of alterations in the amino acid sequence can be drastic. The oxygen-carrying protein in blood, hemoglobin, is built from four chains of more than 140 amino acids each. In sickle cell anemia, an inherited disease, an altered amino acid occurs in the sixth position of a specific sequence of 146. This change causes distortion of the red blood cells, resulting in anemia and many other problems.

The Genetic Key to Life

How does the protein-building apparatus know the correct amino acid sequences for each of the thousands of proteins? The chromosomes of each cell are libraries filled with just such information. Each volume in this library is a gene. When the cell needs a particular protein, it activates the protein’s gene and synthesis begins. The details of this process are not important here except to note that more than 100 separate chemical events have to occur for protein synthesis to happen.

All manifestations of life depend on chemical changes. A class of proteins known as enzymes bind specific molecules and facilitate their chemical transformations. Enzymes speed up reactions enormously. This could be a huge problem, because once the reaction is completed, its endpoint—known as equilibrium—is reached and no further chemical changes occur. Because life depends on chemical changes, when all reactions reach their endpoints, the cell dies.

Amazingly, in living matter none of the reactions ever reach equilibrium. This is so, because the chemical transformations are interlinked, so that the product of one chemical change forms the starting substance of the next. In living matter, every one of the millions of molecules is kept track of. Any shortage or excess immediately results in adjustment in the rates of chemical transformations. The interdependence among cellular components in the vertical direction parallels the logical relationships of written language among letters, words, and sentences all the way to the level of a book.

There is horizontal complementation among cell components as well. For example, proteins cannot be manufactured without assistance from nucleic acids, and nucleic acids cannot be made without proteins. The life of the cell depends on the harmonious and nearly simultaneous operation of its many components. During balanced growth, a steady state exists since none of the reactions is permitted to reach its endpoint. This means that each of the thousands of inter linked chemical reactions is in a non-equilibrium, steady state.

Why Death is Irreversible in a Laboratory

If there are forces in nature that bring about life, we should search diligently to discover and harness them. If abiogenesis is possible, it could be harnessed to restore dead cells, organs, and even organisms to life. Under simulated primordial conditions protein-like matter has been made by heating powders of amino acids to high temperatures. However, these “protenoids” were amino acids randomly linked by unnatural bonds⁴ and have little resemblance to actual proteins.

Even though it is not possible to make biologically useful biopolymers under simulated primordial conditions, we can obtain them from once-living cells. Mixing these isolated biopolymers shortcuts chemical evolution, making it possible to test whether life will start from such a mixture. But in such preparations everything is at equilibrium. Since life happens only when all chemical events within the cell are in a state of non-equilibrium, the best that can be accomplished by this method is the assembly of dead cells.

Fashioning living cells requires absolute control over every molecule, large and small. This is a capacity that science does not have. Chemists can manipulate large numbers of molecules from one form into another, but they cannot transport selected molecules across membranes to reverse conditions of equilibria. This is why we cannot reverse death.

So how did life originate on Earth? This article has revealed the great discrepancy between the biochemistry of living matter and the claims of those who would explain its origins by spontaneous abiogenesis. For the believer in the Creation account of the Bible, the assertion that only the Creator can make life is not an argument for the “God of the gaps.” We have a pretty good idea of what it takes to create life, only we cannot do it. It is an affirmation that life cannot exist apart from God. Indeed, life itself becomes an evidence for an all-wise Creator who chose to create life and share it with us.

1. The number of possible different sequences for a 100 amino acid-long protein is 1.2 x100130, or 12 followed by 129 zeros!