THE ORIGIN OF LIFE: ONE KIND OF CREATURE TO MANY KINDS

(Message by Tanny Keng)

1. The Origin Of Life

a) How did life arise on planet earth? This question has tested the wisdom of human beings down through the ages. Scientists of the 21st Century know more about natural life than people knew in times past. However even today scientists are still a long way from discovering (by their own sciences) how life originated.

b) It's not easy to formulate a theory of life's origins that gives rise to testable predictions — especially if your theory insists that all life came from a single “simple” organism formed naturally from stuff without life. A theory with that constraint produces serious puzzles. However, if a theory allows for Earth’s original life to have comprised numerous complex organisms formed by supernatural intelligence, the puzzles don't arise.

2. One Kind Of Creature To Many Kinds

a) Genesis 1:11, “after its kind”

i) What causes and sustains the development of one kind of organism into another? Genesis says that doesn't happen. God made many different life forms, each "after its kind" (Genesis 1:10-11, 21,24). Paul says, "All flesh is not the same; there is one flesh of men, another of beasts, another of birds, another of fish" (1 Corinthians 15:39). Those are some major divisions of life within which, Genesis says, there were distinctly different and original kinds.

ii) In nature, as a certain kind of organism multiplies, the individuals exhibit variations which may be passed down to their progeny. So through numerous generations there can arise notable variations of the same kind of organism. This is true for bugs, owls, horses, and you-name-it. The variations however are derived from information passed down from the original ancestor and are therefore restrained by how much information that original organism possessed. If one original organism has produced all the kinds of creatures that exist, what vast information it must have contained. Genesis solves this puzzle in three words; it accounts for the various kinds of creatures by saying that each was made separately in the beginning "after its kind."

The End ...