Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the creation of life and biological diversity, part 30.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Last time we began looking at the scientific evidence concerning the origin of life on this planet.

And I explained that the famous experiments during the 1950s conducted by people like Stanley

Miller ultimately failed to prove productive in explaining how

life originated on this planet.

The book by Bradley Olson and Thaxton, The Mystery of Life's Origin, documents the collapse

of this attempt.

You remember I explained that they pointed out that the very processes of natural

destruction and dilution in the primordial waters would have prevented the chemical reactions that supposedly led to life.

They also point out, however, that thermodynamics poses an insuperable problem

for these chemical origin of life scenarios,

because there just isn't any way to harness the raw energy of lightning strikes

or energy from the sun in order to drive chemical evolution forward.

There just isn't any sort of mechanism available on the primordial earth whereby this raw energy could be harnessed

to drive chemical evolution forward.

Moreover, Bradley Olson and Thaxton point out that there was no way to preserve any of the products

of chemical evolution in order for the supposed second step in the

process to take place. The scientist can artificially isolate the products of the first

chemical development and then subject them to a second step.

But in the primordial seas, there was no way of collecting and preserving any products

...