"The first stage on the road to life is presumed to have been the buildup, by purely chemical synthetic processes occurring on the surface of the early earth, of all the basic organic compounds necessary for the formation of a living cell. These are supposed to have accumulated in the primeval oceans, creating a nutrient broth, the so-called ‘pre-biotic soup.’ In certain specialized environments, these organic compounds were assembled into large macromolecules, proteins and nucleic acids. Eventually, over millions of years, combinations of these macromolecules occurred which were endowed with the property of self-reproduction. Then driven by natural selection evermore efficient and complex self-reproducing molecular systems evolved until finally the first simple cell system emerged. The existence of a pre-biotic soup is crucial to the whole scheme. Without an abiotic accumulation of the building blocks of the cell no life could ever evolve. If the traditional story is true, therefore, there must have existed for millions of years a rich mixture of organic compounds in the ancient oceans and some of this material would very likely have been trapped in the sedimentary rocks lain down in the seas of those remote times. Yet rocks of great antiquity have been examined over the past two decades and in none of them has any trace of abiotically-produced compounds been found. Most notable of these rocks are the ‘dawn rocks’ of western Greenland, the earliest dated rocks on earth, considered to be approaching 3,900 million years old.... As on so many occasions, paleontology has again failed to substantiate evolutionary presumptions. Considering the way the pre-biotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence."¹⁵

"The chance that higher life forms might have emerged (through evolutionary processes) is comparable with the chance that a ‘tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.’"¹⁶

"One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom, a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written."¹⁷

"One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible."¹⁸

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."¹⁹

"A curious flaw of human nature is to permit the imagery of a catchy phrase to shape one’s reasoning. Haldane’s hot dilute soup became ‘primordial soup,’ a feature that has been popularized for nearly 50 years without geologic evidence that it ever existed."²⁰

"The intuitive feeling that pure chance could never have achieved the degree of complexity and ingenuity so ubiquitous in nature has been a continuing source of skepticism ever since the publication of The Origin; and throughout the past century there has always existed a significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims. In fact, the number of biologists who have expressed some degree of disillusionment is practically endless. When Arthur Koestler organized the Alpbach Symposium in 1969 called ‘Beyond Reductionism,’ for the expressed purpose of bringing together biologists critical of orthodox Darwinism, he was able to include in the list of participants many authorities of world stature, such as Swedish Neurobiologist Holgar Hyden, zoologists Paul Weiss and W. H. Thorpe, Linguist David McNeil and Child Psychologist Jean Piaget. Koestler had this to say in his opening remarks: ‘...invitations were confined to personalities in academic life with undisputed authority in their respective fields, who nevertheless shared that holy discontent.’"²¹

"Precious little in the way of biochemical evolution could have happened on the earth. If one counts the number of trial assemblies of amino acids that are needed to give rise to the enzymes, the probability of their discovery by random shufflings turns out to be less than one in ten to the 40 thousand."²²

"If anything is ten to the 50th power or less chance, it will never happen, even cosmically, in the whole universe."²³

"In the human body, DNA ‘programs’ all characteristics such as hair, skin, eyes, and height. DNA determines the arrangement for 206 bones, 600 muscles, 10,000 auditory nerve fibers, two million optic nerve fibers, 100 billion nerve cells, 400 billion feet of blood vessels and capillaries and so on. Such extraordinary sophistication can only reflect intelligent design."²⁴

"The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder." (Stated by Charles Darwin in a letter to Asa Gray, the American biologist, written in 1861—two years after the publication of The Origin of the Species.)

"It is easy to sympathize with Darwin. Such feelings have probably occurred to most biologists at times, for to common sense it does indeed appear absurd to propose that chance could have thrown together devices of such complexity and ingenuity that they appear to represent the very epitome of perfection.... Aside from any quantitative considerations, it seems intuitively impossible that such self-evident brilliance in the execution of design could ever have occasionally hit on a relatively ingenious adaptive end, it seems inconceivable that it could have reached so many ends of such surpassing ‘perfection.’"²⁵

"Evolutionists greatly depend on random mutations to bring about the tremendous variation needed to produce all the life forms that now exist, including man. But this is where the great evolutionary scientists think that the theory of evolution has broken down. For example, Dr. Murray Eden, Professor of Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. who at the conference entitled Mathematical Challenges to Neo-Darwinian Interpretation found in the Wistar Institute Press delivered a paper entitled ‘Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory.’ In this paper he commented on the possibilities of random mutations accounting for the great variation evolutionists say must have taken place. He states, ‘It is our contention that if random is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws, physical, chemical and biological."²⁶

"The mere existence of that cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all though their waking hours, calling to each in endless wonderment, talk of nothing except that cell.... If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime I will charter a sky-writing airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all of my money runs out."²⁷

A single drop of blood has 35,000,000 red blood cells.

A single red blood cell has 280,000,000 hemoglobin molecules, each molecule having 10,000 atoms.

A single man has 27,000,000,000,000 red blood cells.

At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random. Now imagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling at just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.³¹

"It is not possible in a googol of operations to select at random, from the possible infinity of forms, the shapes and arrangements of the dextral and sinistral bones of even one mammal…. Let us recognize that if a result depends upon a hundred factors, and if the probability of getting each one right is 1 in 10, then the probability of getting the whole 100 right is only one in a googol."⁴⁵

Surely the probability of the whole body is far less than that of any of the internal organs: that of two eyes to send two images over two cables of 1,000,000 conductors each to form one image is less than that of one eye; and surely that of one eye is much less than merely taking the bones of the skeleton and placing them into their proper positions. [—which he calculates as 1 chance in approximately 5.6 X 10388.]⁴⁷

"The discovery of life on one other planet—e.g. Mars—can, in the words of the American Physicist Phillip Morrison, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ‘transform the origin of life from a miracle to a statistic.’"⁴⁸

"That which makes me of this opinion, that those Worlds are not without such a Creature endowed with Reason, is that otherwise our Earth would have too much the Advantage of them, in being the only part of the Universe that could boast of such a Creature...."⁴⁹

"The discovery of life (on other planets), especially if it were to prove widespread, would of course have a very important bearing on the question of how life originated on earth. For it would undoubtedly provide powerful circumstantial evidence for the traditional evolutionary scenario, enhancing enormously the credibility of the belief that the root from chemistry to life can be surmounted by simple natural processes wherever the right conditions exist."⁵⁰

"At present, if we are to exclude UFO’s and the claims of Von Daniken and his fellow travelers, there is not a shred of evidence for extra-terrestrial life, and there is no way of excluding the possibility of life being unique to earth with all the philosophical consequences this entails."⁵¹

"It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and an ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance. Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which—a functional protein or a gene—is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything perused by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy. We feel humbled, as neolithic man would in the presence of twentieth century technology.

"To those who still dogmatically advocate that all this new reality is the result of pure chance one can only reply, like Alice, incredulous in the face of the contradictory logic of the Red Queen:

"Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the queen. ‘When I was your age I did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’"⁵²