Biblical skepticism of the Origin of Life

@r_speir will no doubt provide his own answer but I will simply say that I have no problems with abiogenesis because that is what the Bible describes. Even man is described as being made “from the dust of the ground.” Abiogenesis refers to life coming from non-living material. That is exactly what the Bible describes. And unless one thinks that biological life ALWAYS existed, then there MUST have been a point in time when non-living matter first became biological life. That’s abiogenesis: biological-life from that which is not biological-life.

The Bible describes such biological-life from non-biological-life in multiple passages but this is one of my favorites:

Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. – Ecclesiastes 3:19-20

Science doesn’t care whether or not the abiogenesis (which must have happened at some point in the past) was willed by a deity. That’s a separate question for theologians and philosophers to address. Until a scientist demonstrates that a deity’s role can somehow be detected and investigated in that abiogenesis event, I will consider the question outside the realm of science.

Seeing how both scientists and theologians agree that there was a time in the past when the first non-living ingredients became a living organism, we should all be able to affirm abiogenesis as a given.


POST-SCRIPT: As a pre-emptive clarification against a likely reply which may come from some of my Christian brethren, I should point out that we should all agree that God is NOT a biological organism. Therefore, don’t try to pretend that Genesis defies abiogenesis because “life came from life”. As I have explained on these forums many times over the years, the English language happens to apply the word “life” to both biological bodies and spirit-beings but that is NOT necessarily the case for Biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek. See my post of November 2018:

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