You still haven't explained what this first cell is going to eat. Remember, you cannot create energy out of nothing.
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So what's it going to eat? Remember, you cannot create energy out of nothing.
Great post. Darwin never intended to abandon his Christianity. Imagine the most devout Christian that you know and, with the sole possible exception of the age of the earth, you'd have a very good approximation of Darwin's view of the world. Darwin's
On the Origin of Species postulates the following, and everybody seems to agree when they aren't claiming to disagree in general:
1. At some point, life appeared. No life is immortal. All life occurs in populations in which parents procreate and have children.
2. Children inherit characteristics/features of the parent(s).
3. Each child develops its own mutations, usually undetectable but could be pronounced; children can be distinguished from their parent(s). [note: there is no such term microevolution or macroevolution]
4. Characteristics/features that afford a statistical advantage to successfully procreation, which includes enabling survival long enough to do so, will result is a statistically higher incidence of those characteristics/features in subsequent generations.
5. Characteristics/features that prevent survival long enough to procreate, and/or prevent successful procreation, will eventually disappear from future generations.
Where Darwin worried about infuriating Christian sensibilities was in his overarching conclusion:
6. Given the small extent that children differ from their parents, much longer time frames are required to explain the current species than a few thousand years.
Darwin never got into how life was created in the first place, assuming that Genesis is correct and that God got the ball rolling. Darwin was simply trying to explain how the current species that we observe today came to be, and he dared to suggest evolution over a long period of time as opposed to God creating them in their present form in the relatively recent past.
Nonetheless, I'm sure you have noticed that every single discussion of this sort eventually becomes a bogus discussion of how Darwin's godless atheism had him promoting abiogenesis. Every single time. As such, the brilliant questions you ask (that I noted above) never get answered, and instead branch into additional bogus discussions of how there was no Noah and no ark.
If you will allow me, I'd like to give you the atheist's theory of abiogenesis, which is not a theory of science, that can be taken for what its worth. Please note that this has absolutely nothing to do with any theory of evolution, and is entirely compatible with creationism, being just one possible mechanism used by God to create life initially.
Consider the Fischer-Tropsh process, whereby an environment of high temperatures and pressures results in the formation of stored energy. Consider the creation of diamonds which requires an environment of high temperatures and pressures for carbon to transition to that particular allotrope. Life probably began at the bottom of the ocean (high pressures) near thermal vents (high temperatures) where all the elements needed for life to arise were present with energy/food/fuel to sustain it as it evolved.
Methane, water and other minerals, along with standard chemistry where high temperatures and pressures are also present, eventually created sugars and amino acids, which themselves eventually formed proteins and lipids. The lipids become the focus of the conversation surrounding your question because initially there are simply chemical reactions occurring ... but the lipids eventually form "membranes", separating the chemical reactions into those that are occurring "inside" from those that are occurring "outside." Membranes change over time time along with everything else and eventually become cell walls, and when cells eventually form, what the cells consume is dictated by the existing chemical processes, i.e. the "food" and "feces" of the cell is just the fuel and waste of the existing chemical processes.
But before these membranes form what could be called "cells," the proteins and lipids had to develop RNA which had to become DNA. At some point there was life, and at that moment, life began to evolve. Also, there is nothing prohibiting any new life form from having come into existence yesterday at some thermal vent, being a culmination of all of the above.
Key Word: Hyperthermophiles
Riddle: When do boiling shrimp not boil?
