Absentee Evidence

“Scientists now convinced of inevitability of life everywhere,” reads the headline in the Staten Island “Advance” of December 5, 1978. Based on a dispatch from the “Christian Science Monitor,” the article admits that the conviction is based more on faith than evidence. Cyril Ponnamperuma of the University of Maryland expresses this conviction this way: “Life may be considered to be an inevitable process and bound to appear in the cosmos wherever conditions are favorable.” He further states: “There is nothing unique about our sun, which has accomplished the creation of life on this planet. The laws of chemistry and physics are universal laws.” But they acknowledge that the sun has lost its power to create now. Also, they must claim that the laws of chemistry and physics spontaneously generated, since they rule out the existence of a lawgiver.

The article concludes: “In saying such things, biologists today do not feel particularly smug when considering the ignorance of their predecessors. They know they themselves cannot yet explain how prebiotic chemicals became organic life. But they do have faith that they are on the right trail to the answer.”

The victims of the Jonestown mass suicides in Guyana also had a kind of faith. As it was in Jesus’ day, so it continues to be today: “Blind guides is what they are. If, then, a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”—Matt. 15:14.