In 1000 words: A Special Case

A child asking where babies from is the start of his lifelong quest to justify his own existence. His next curiosity might be where his parents came from and where did the line of descendents start? As humans, most of our knowledge comes from experience, but how do we comprehend something that seems impossible to experience? In the case of life on Earth, the best explanation is that an omnipotent being is responsible.

We have come to understand much about the physical aspect of this universe through science, and the same can be said about biology, though not with the same certainty, because life forms can adapt. That's just one characteristic we pin to our definition of life, but even with all of the things we've learned, other than what it does we still don't have a concrete understanding of what life is or how it started. (Russell, 32) One thing we do know as certain as our physical laws is that life only comes from other life. We observe this on a daily basis through the birth of a new nephew, healing of a wound, or cultivating yeast to use in producing beer. Babies don't pop up from the ground, wounds don't heal on dead people, and we need some initial yeast cells to start the population. All life that we've observed in this universe are dependent beings, as in they are dependent on another being for their existence.

A philosopher named William Rowe seeks to find the start of life's long line of descendents, or at least justify its existence. In his argument he argues that the all dependent beings must come from another being, but that there is a starting being that is not dependent on another for its existence. (Rowe, 18) Another philosopher by the name of David Hume criticizes Rowe's premise that there must be a starting being. He brings up the situation of time extending forever both in the future and past and states that all beings are justified without a nondependent being. (Rowe, 21)

Here is where I would like to make a distinction between our physical world and biological beings. Matter, for the most part, is nondestructive and can assume many forms. We can take some metal from one mine, a different type from another and craft it into a complex computer. When it's obsolete, it's thrown away and can be recycled back into lumps of metal. The substance of matter doesn't create other matter, nor was it created by different matter. Whether there is a beginning to the physical universe or not, matter exists the entire span of time , so inside our universe it is a nondependent substance or being. It seems to just be another constant or rule that defines what our universe is, like gravity and electrostatic forces. Life, on the other hand, is definitely destructive whatever it is. Organisms only live so long and cannot be reanimated, though their physical bodies change form. Populations can swell or struggle to stay in existence. The Earth was formed at some point, so somewhere between then and now life started. If we accept that life is dependent, then we must conclude that there is a being responsible for bringing life to Earth, whether from some other planet or by another means. If we assume life came from a being not from Earth and if time is infinite in both directions, then there would seem like no need to have an ultimate explanation of where it came from. This seems a plausible case, except that life has only been found on Earth and couldn't survive anywhere else, since it is destructive. How then, can life be explained?

An atheistic natural selection argument would suggest that life is an arrangement of matter in constant chemical reactions predetermined by the rules that guide the physical world (Hazen, 1715). This leaves no room for free thought as we like to call it, choice, or alternate outcomes if everything can be described with equations. But what of the future, then? Matter may sometimes tell a story of how it got to be there, but then how are we, if we are matter, able to contemplate the future? A free falling stone is not able to prepare for when it hits the ground. And if our lives were able to be described by an equation, could we not predict what we are going to do and do the opposite? This contradicts the notion of consciousness. An omnipotent being that created life on Earth seems much more probable than my choices not being choices at all. The best explanation so far is that a living being, being all-powerful, created life on Earth. This satisfies the requirement of life being dependent, and if it is omnipotent it can survive anywhere, inside our universe for its entire length of time or outside, for which we don't know if our rules apply. So it is at least all-powerful in terms of our universe. This does not rule out the possibility of life forms adapting to any extent, it preserves the idea that physical matter and rules are different from life, and allows for the chaos and unpredictability found in living organisms.

In the case of Earth, we cannot simply explain all dependent beings in terms of another dependent being because there was a beginning to life on Earth, so there must be a starting being. Without the presence of life outside Earth, there is not strong enough evidence to believe that life came from another planet or even that it could survive elsewhere. Therefore, the possibility of an omnipotent being is the best explanation for how life appeared on Earth.

References

Russell, M. (2006). First life. American Scientist, 94(1), 32-39.

Rowe, W. (1993). Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (pp.16-28). Wadsworth

Hazen, R. M. (2006). Mineral surfaces and the prebiotic selection and organization of biomolecules. American Mineralogist, 91(11), 1715-1715.