Introduction

“How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists ... to consider that life has existed during eternity, and not matter? ... How do you know that in 10,000 years one will not consider it more likely that matter has emerged from life?”

—Louis Pasteur

Once upon a time (as in a fairy tale), most of us believed that the food we ate was basically wholesome, nutritious, and free from dangerous chemicals, that advertising was believable, and that product labels truly described the qualities and contents of what we ate. Once upon a time, most of the world believed in the integrity of our heads of state, high-ranking political officials, and local leaders. Once upon a time, we thought our children were getting a solid education in the public schools. Once upon a time, many of us believed atomic energy had “peacetime uses” that were perfectly safe and congruous with a happy and healthy society.

Yet in recent times our illusions have been shattered. Repeated exposes of widespread consumer fraud, grand political scandals, and toxic-waste dumps have all but destroyed our former innocence. We now know that a veil of fantasy and deception can be created with unprecedented expertise through the mass media, making it impossible to distinguish between substance and simulation, reality and illusion.

Scientists as a class have long sat protected in their ivory chambers, exempt from dishonesty. Science, among all other fields, has been regarded as the ultimate meeting ground for seekers and dispensers of truth. The dazzling technological achievements of modern science have given it an aura of infallibility. In Passages About Earth, William Irwin Thompson writes, “Just as once there was no appeal from the power of religion without risking damnation, so now there is no appeal from the power of science without risking a charge of irrationality or insanity.” But scientists in key academic, industrial, and government positions have shown that they are indeed capable of mixing personal beliefs and ambitions with their research, thus altering the results.

When this happens we are no longer dealing with a search for truth but with a pseudoscience and its resultant array of distortions, fabrications, and false information. Unfortunately, this unscientific method has been applied to the most fundamental field of scientific inquiry—the nature and origin of life. Yet when scientists present untested, unprovable speculations about life’s origin, people tend to accept them with blind faith.

Some scientists popularize the notion that a human being is merely a conglomeration of unconscious molecules. But they cannot explain how mere molecules can experience joy upon seeing loved ones, or feel disturbed by the death of one.

A recent exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History displayed a number of flasks and beakers. Each contained one of the chemicals found in the human body. The caption explained that although these chemicals represented all the contents of a human body in correct weight and proportion, they could not be considered life, nor could any amount of scientific manipulation bring them to life.

As Michael Polianyi, author of Atomic Reactions, notes,

Current biology is based on the assumption that you can explain the process of life in terms of chemistry and physics; and, of course, physics and chemistry are represented ultimately in term of forces acting between atomic particles. This is the cause of our corruption of the conception of man, reducing him either to an insentient automaton or to a bundle of appetites. This is why science can be invoked so easily in support of totalitarian violence; why science has become the greatest source of dangerous fallacies.

Today many scientists are propagating the doctrine that life originates from matter. Popular works and textbooks posit that life gradually arose from chemicals, a “primordial soup” consisting of amino acids, proteins, and other essential ingredients. However, science cannot provide proof of this, either experimentally or theoretically. In fact these scientists hold their stance essentially on faith even in the face of all sorts of scientific objections. Physicist Hubert Yockey has demonstrated by information theory that even a single informational molecule such as cytochome (what to speak of complex organisms) could not have arisen by chance in the estimated lifetime of the earth: “One must conclude, that, contrary to the established and current wisdom, a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written.”

Likewise, some scientists promote the widely held belief that the sun, stars, planets, galaxies, and conscious life suddenly sprang from a “big bang.” Dr. Edwin Godwin, a Princeton University biologist, has compared the chances of a planet such as ours arising from a “big bang” to the likelihood of an unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.

The noted biologist W. H. Thorpe writes, “We may be faced with a possibility that the origin of life, like the origin of the universe, becomes an impenetrable barrier to science and a block which resists all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics.” And Einstein notes, “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we, with our modest powers, must feel humbled.”

Life Comes From Life demonstrates with simple logic that life cannot be reduced to atoms and molecules, and that matter—without the living force, or spirit—is incapable of generating life in any form. It is also hoped that this book will urge scientists to re-dedicate themselves to a more genuine and intense quest for truth and knowledge and to thereby redirect their valuable intelligence, resources, and work toward the true benefit of the world.

—Thoudam Damodara Singh, Ph.D.