The creation of life

Isn’t that amazing?

We seem to be on a planet with a vast array of other living animals and plants. Of course – I could be dreaming it!

Over billions of years organic molecules accumulated in the seas and joined together. The building blocks of protein, ribonucleic acid, carbohydrates and lipids bonded together and the first organism came into being.

From that first simple organism, through a series of evolutionary steps, all life evolved.

As a biologist I can appreciate the chemistry involved and the way these steps might have occurred. I can see why people find it incredible to understand. It is remarkable, stupendous and amazingly unlikely.

Yet it happened. Somehow it happened.

Given billions of years and the infinity of space I believe anything that is possible to happen will happen.

Yet the creation of life is stupendous.

Given more stars and planets than we can conceive it seems likely that it will have happened elsewhere too. If there are enough monkeys with enough keyboards sooner or later they will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But that does not make it any the less wonderful.

The cop out is once again to put in a deity and put the mystery one step removed. Presumably the deity is alive? So life started somewhere before?

Life is awesome. It’s complexity is majestic.

I do believe that it happened spontaneously through natural laws. The human body is too badly thought through to have been designed (unless we have a deity who is inept or has a warped sense of humour). Why have one opening to the lungs? A neck that breaks? A excretory system and egestory system that opens into the genitals?

No – I believe animals, with all their design faults, are the functional result of evolution and not some cosmic designer.

But that doesn’t stop me from shaking my head at the wonder of it, the sheer improbability and the stupendous results of all this teeming life.

I believe we, as conscious, sentient and supposedly intelligent, animals, have a duty to nurture it.