Suppose you wanted to build the first living molecules from scratch on an early earth. Before you choose your chemicals, you have to choose your sky. And here is the trouble: both of the skies on offer destroy the very thing you are trying to make.
This is the atmosphere problem, and it has sat near the center of origin of life research for about seventy years. I want to lay it out plainly, because it is one of those difficulties that gets talked around far more often than it gets talked about.
Horn one: an atmosphere with oxygen
Oxygen is reactive. That is what oxidation means, and it is why iron rusts. If the early atmosphere contained oxygen, the fragile organic molecules that are supposed to be the building blocks of life would have been oxidized, broken down before they had any chance to assemble into something more complex. The chemistry needs those molecules to survive long enough to link up. Oxygen does not let them.
Horn two: an atmosphere without oxygen
So take the oxygen away. Now a second problem steps forward. No oxygen means no ozone layer, because ozone is made from oxygen. And no ozone layer means the surface of the planet is bathed in unfiltered ultraviolet radiation. Ultraviolet light is brutal to organic molecules. What oxygen would have oxidized, the sun now tears apart.
Oxygen kills the chemistry. No oxygen kills the chemistry. That is the squeeze, and there is no third sky.
Proposed escapes
Researchers have not ignored this. They have proposed that the first molecules were shielded, perhaps under a layer of water, perhaps within or beneath minerals, where the radiation could not reach. These are serious suggestions made by serious people, and I do not wave them away. But notice what they are: attempts to hide the chemistry from the very environment that is supposed to have produced it. The basic squeeze has never gone away. It has only been moved indoors.
Why seventy years matters
A problem that stays open for a few years is a puzzle. A problem that stays open for seventy years, through generations of researchers and enormous effort, is telling you something about the shape of the question itself. The atmosphere problem has not been solved. It has been managed.
I do not say this to mock the scientists who work on it. I spent twelve years trying to argue myself out of belief in God, and I know how badly a person can want a naturalistic answer to be available. But wanting it does not make the sky cooperate. Life needs an atmosphere that preserves its chemistry, and neither of the two on offer does.
When both available options destroy the result, perhaps the result did not come from either one. Perhaps life was not assembled by an accommodating atmosphere at all, but made by a Maker who needed no shelter from His own sunlight.
Get new articles by email
Subscribe and I will send you a short note whenever a new article is published on this site. No spam, and you can unsubscribe at any time.