Pat Robertson and Ken Ham are having a disagreement over the age of the Earth (see video for details). On the side of reason: Pat Robertson (no joke). Robertson maintains, to all the world’s astonishment, that the earth is ancient and that you’d have to be “deaf, dumb and blind” to not know this (amen Pat). However, Pat Robertson also denies evolution.
Young earth creationists deny the age of the earth. Under their beliefs evolution is not even possible, and since we have no hint of any other naturalistic mechanism for creating life (which we surely would have found by now if there was such a thing) then a belief in creationism is the only way to get life.
If you admit to the great age of the earth, it is all but impossible to maintain creationism, as I’ve written before. If you believe that new life cannot emerge after life begins, then it follows that today’s living species must be descended from the bacteria that existed 3.8 billion years ago (evolution).
Why is this so? To prove X is impossible scientifically, there are two requirements that must be met: There must be (1) no well-confirmed theory or generalization that shows X is possible, and (2) there must be literally no examples of X even after doing a lot of looking. No one concludes that it is impossible to build a sphere of gold a mile wide just because they’ve never seen one, and this is because the first requirement isn’t met: we have seen gold molded into a wide variety of shapes and sizes, so it could probably be molded into a mile-wide sphere if someone wanted to do it.
We do have a well-confirmed theory that says nothing can go faster than the speed of light (General Relativity) and we have done a lot of looking on earth and through the telescoped and have never seen otherwise. Every object we look at in the sky could potentially prove this belief wrong, and yet it has survived hundreds if not thousands of observations. The conclusion that nothing travels faster than light speed meets requirement 2 and exceeds requirement 1 (there is a well-confirmed theory showing it is impossible, not just an absence of reasons to believe it is possible).
We have great theoretical reasons for thinking abiogenesis is naturalistically impossible when life is already present: if a loose chain of biological molecules was floating around in a pond somewhere, it would be consumed or broken up by the bacteria of the surrounding environment before the chain grew long enough to begin any primitive reproduction, and even if it did begin to reproduce, the new species would probably be driven extinct immediately because it would be outgunned by highly evolved modern bacteria. Moreover, the theoretical reasons I just gave are supported by the observational fact that we’ve never directly seen or been able to infer that new life has arisen.
All that said, if abiogenesis is naturalistically impossible when life is already present, is it supernaturally possible? We already know that we have no direct observations of supernatural creation happening. We lack any theoretical reason for believing it can (it’s not like we have some scientific reason to think God exists which would dictate supernatural creation is possible, moreover, if God doesn’t exist then it isn’t). Even better, given the law of conservation of matter and energy, we can be sure that the first life (that is, the first arrangement of matter that could replicate itself) must have come into existence from pre-existing materials that lacked reproductive capacity. So, we have a theoretical reason for believing that supernatural creation can’t happen.
Placed in argument form, we have this:
1. Abiogenesis is impossible in the presence of life.
2. Humans (or spiders, or alligators, or any other species you care to name) began to exist at some point in the past after the first life began.
3. Humans (or any species you care to name) either began to exist (a) through the reproduction of a previous organism or (b) it began without the reproduction of a previous organism (abiogenesis).
4. Because of (1), we know (b) is false.
Conclusion: If (b) is false, (a) must be true (humans began because of the reproduction of a previous organism).
This same argument can be run on the species humans evolved from, and the species that that species evolved from, and so on down the line, until you reach the first living thing, in which case premise (1) falls apart and the original life form is able to originate from inanimate matter.
I’ve already shown that premise one is true, premise two is a well-verified fact of the fossil record, and the rest of the argument is just logical steps (they are absolutely true). The only uncertainty sits in the first two premises and only a minor amount of it: I can’t imagine any reasonable person could think that there is a major uncertainty (only the type of uncertainty you get on the non-existence of magic elves: there’s a one out of a million chance it’s false). Moreover, the evidence explained by descent with modification is overwhelming and overwhelmingly strong, erasing a reasonable doubt if you even have one.
