Think back to your high school or college biology textbook, or any evolutionary documentary on “early earth” you’ve ever watched. How was early earth described? Probably as some “hellish” landscape with bubbling lava, no liquid water, and absolutely no life. That’s the story kids are still being told—and even evolutionists don’t really believe it anymore.
I was recently sent an essay by a science writer, Michael Marshall, who specializes in the origin of life, titled “Life Happened Fast: It’s time to rethink how we study life’s origins. It emerged far earlier, and far quicker, than we once thought possible.”
It was a fascinating read—not because I agreed with any of the content, but because it highlighted how nearly everything evolutionists have assumed about early earth and the origin of life has now been shown to be wrong. They’re having to rethink (once again) the beginning of their entire story. Evolutionary belief is so plastic!
And don’t take my word for it! After describing the classic picture of early earth, Marshall writes:
That’s the story palaeontologists and geologists told for many decades. But a raft of evidence suggests it is completely wrong.
The young Earth was not hellish, or at least not for long (in geological terms). And, crucially, life formed quickly after the planet solidified–perhaps astonishingly quickly. It may be that the first life emerged within just millions of years of the planet’s origin.
Considering how complex even the “simplest” life is, this significantly shortened timescale makes the evolutionary origin of life even more impossible than it already was (and it was already utterly impossible—life doesn’t come from nonlife, a fact that’s recognized as the scientific law of biogenesis).
Before we address that further, I want to highlight another quote where Marshall describes why so many origin-of-life researchers assumed this inhospitable early earth:
With hindsight, it is strange that the idea of hellscape Earth ever became as established as it did. There was never any direct evidence of such lethal conditions. However, that lack of evidence may be the explanation. Humans are very prone to theorise wildly when there’s no evidence, and then to become extremely attached to their speculations.
In other words, this picture taught as scientific fact to millions of children, young people, and adults isn’t based on observational science. It’s entirely based on assumptions (most of which have now been shown to be false!). It’s a blind-faith belief.
So just how fast did life supposedly emerge? Well, the author notes that in his 2020 book on the topic, he had said that life had one billion years to form somewhere on earth. Well, five years later the timeline has been significantly revised to just 100–200 million years. That’s a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms (and shows you how quickly evolutionary ideas come and go!).
So what does this mean for evolutionists? Marshall explains that too:
The most immediate implication is that our ideas cannot rely on the power of chance at all. There have been a great many hypotheses about the origins of life that relied on a coincidence: say, a one-in-a-billion collision between two biological molecules in the primordial soup. But if life really formed within 0.1 billion years of the planet’s birth, ideas like this are absolutely untenable. There just wasn’t time.
He’s right—there wasn’t enough time for life to form in just 100–200 million years. But there also wasn’t enough time when they thought they had a billion years. And there still wouldn’t be enough time if they had 10 billion years, because life does not come from nonlife.
The incredibly complex system of information that is DNA—the most complex language and information system in existence and that we’re only just beginning to truly understand—could not come from a random arrangement of the right molecules that just happened to spontaneously form. It’s impossible. It’s simply too complex (and information only comes from other information, and ultimately from a mind, anyway!).
And that’s just life itself! There are other problems, like where the oceans of liquid water that supposedly somehow quickly covered earth (and are necessary for life) came from, or how that water was in liquid form when the sun, according to evolutionary modeling, was 30% or more fainter at the time when life was supposedly emerging.
Evolutionists have always had a big problem when it comes to the origin of life, but new research that overturns everything they’ve thought about the supposed past only makes their problems worse. That’s why Marshall thinks that “what origins research needs is open-mindedness and a willingness to disagree constructively.”
Of course, he doesn’t mean abandoning the ideas of evolution, billions of years, or life from nonlife—that wouldn’t be allowed. (Though I imagine that aliens seeding life on earth would be an acceptable solution to their problem. Intelligent design is usually fine as long as it’s ET and not God—and certainly not the God of the Bible!)
We don’t need to spend millions of dollars and countless hours of valuable research time trying to figure out how life first arrived on planet earth. We already have the answer: “In the beginning, God. . . .” (Genesis 1:1)
