What is the current theory on how life started on Earth?

It might well be that God orders and sustains all of nature such that when a cloud bursts or a micelle forms, that's God's hand at play. That's a theological question, and a position that is entirely compatible with our research project.

Look at it this way: if we are uncovering the mechanism by which God created life, that mechanism doesn't necessarily mean the 1050 probability special creation. Just as God creates rain every day through the regular operation of nature, is it not at least possible, in principle, that God created life in the same way?

Again, nobody is suggesting that the modern contents of the cell were all in place in the first living system. Take the approach that Szostak is pushing, for instance. His approach covers both a possible historical scenario and an approach to simply creating a minimal living system in the lab.

He proposes taking a self-reproducing fatty acid vesicle and encapsulating within it a self-reproducing RNA system. If the RNA has some function that aids the growth of the vesicle then the two can grow and divide regularly.

We know fatty acids can be formed by reactions occurring in nature. We know they aggregate and grow and divide without human intervention. We have increasingly good evidence that RNA can be made abiotically, though I'm not convinced yet. We know that populations of a few billion short RNA polymers -a perfectly reasonable number to have in nature, given Avogadro's constant - can respond to selective pressures s develop new functions including replication. We know all of these things can occur in conditions resembling the early ocean, and that vesicles can spontaneously concentrate and encapsulate molecules which would otherwise be too dilute.

That is a far cry from the spontaneous formation of a modern cell complete with cell walls (which nobody suggests were present at the origins of life) and an ordered cytoplasm (which, if it existed, is not going to have the same composition as today and is more likely to be based on lipid compartments or aqueous phase separation) for no reason at all. It's not necessarily giving us life either but it's much more representative of the kind of scenario we actually discuss, and thus that you should target, rather than attacking straw men. It's also entirely compatible with God's existence and with a divine role in creating and sustaining nature - hardly a radically new idea in Christian theology.

So it seems to me that you have at least one of three problems. You don't know what scientists actually propose as prebiotic scenarios, so you shout bullshit at imagined cases instead. You have a bizarre and limited conception of divine creation that demands the miraculous intervention of God at the origins of life rather than allowing for God to operate by sustaining creation and order. And you seem to conflate that theological question, the why - regardless of the details of life's origin, God created life and us and we ought to be grateful for that and rejoice - with the scientific question of working out the how. The two aren't incompatible unless your theology demands they be incompatible, and there are orthodox and longstanding traditions of Christian theology which would say they are compatible.

I think this has gone massively off topic, so I'm not going to continue this further. If you'd like to learn more about what people in my community actually claim about the origins of life drop me a message and I'll see what I can recommend.

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