Questions about the mysteries of life and its origins have always fascinated thinking people. Where shall we go for answers?
Leave such inquiries to science, some would say. That is not the domain of faith and religious inquiry.
There was a most interesting article in March 1998 National Geographic entitled "The Rise of Life on Earth." It encapsulated the latest scientific views of prominent scientists about life’s origins. They’ve narrowed the kind of place life began into three possibilities:
• Either a ball of ice
• Or a pond. Interesting that Charles Darwin never addressed the question in "Origin of Species." All we have is a letter he wrote in to a friend in 1871 suggesting that simple organisms might have arisen from a mixture of organic chemicals in a "warm little pond" over eons of time
• Or a cauldron.
Doesn’t that give you a lot of confidence, to know that science can look back and be that contradictory regarding the kind of environment in which life began!
The problem is not science itself, but presuppositions and prejudgments made by those who would call themselves scientists. If approached from a perspective that rules out even the possibility of God, we have to look for other alternatives. It is subsequently reduced to "silliness."