[align=center]
The First Cell 1
[/align]

If, despite virtually impossible odds, proteins arose by chance processes, there is not the remotest reason to believe they could ever form a membrane-encased, self-reproducing, self-repairing, metabolizing, living cell (a).

a . ??Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. ... We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully ??designed?? to have come into existence by chance.? Dawkins, pp. 1, 43.

Yet, after such acknowledgments, Dawkins, an avowed atheist and perhaps the world??s leading Darwinian, tries to show that life came about by chance without an intelligent designer. Dawkins fails to grasp the complexity in life.

??The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.? Denton, p. 264.

??Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which??a functional protein or gene??is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artefacts appear clumsy. We feel humbled, as neolithic man would in the presence of twentieth-century technology. It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate.? Ibid., p. 342.

??We have seen that self-replicating systems capable of Darwinian evolution appear too complex to have arisen suddenly from a prebiotic soup. This conclusion applies both to nucleic acid systems and to hypothetical protein-based genetic systems.? Shapiro, p. 207.

??We do not understand how this gap in organization was closed, and this remains the most crucial unsolved problem concerning the origin of life.? Ibid., p. 299.

??More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.? Klaus Dose, ??The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers,? Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1988, p. 348.

In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood - 30. The First Cell