In general, we’ve never been able to have very interesting debates about evolution on this board because almost no one among our regulars is either a creationist, or interested in the subject. So this is thread is really something more of a question about social movements as much as science. And more specifically it’s about abiogenesis (the study of how life could have arisen spontaneously from the early conditions on earth), how creationists scoff at it, and what major developments in the field might do to their movement.
Essentially, the common view of most of the more sophisticated ID theorists and creationists is that, while they may have to retreat on most other fronts, abiogenesis is simply where naturalistic explanations of life will and must fail. This idea is essentially held as their bedrock position: maybe science might be able to defend everything else (evolution), but it can never, ever get over this particular hump (abiogenesis).
This also leads to a peculiar implication that it discredits all of evolution. ID theorists are the best at this: while they generally headline their work as taking Darwin down a peg they are generally VERY careful not to claim outright that they discount natural selection as a plausible speciation mechanism or even common descent as a fact. Instead, by attacking the fundamentals of molecular evolution and abiogenesis, they seem to feel that they can undermine Darwinian synthesis without having to actually come out and say “the Dodo didn’t evolve from pigeons: preposterous!” Regular creationists do the same sort of thing, only in a less sophisticated way: they joke about “molecules to man” as if the believed impluasibility of the “molecules” part discredited the rest of the chain of common descent.
What I suspect, however, is that such creationists and ID theorists are in for a big surprise in the relatively near future, as major developments in the study of early life continue apace and gain wider notice and appeal.
Now, to be clear, abiogenesis is, at base, and maybe always will be, a science of plausibility rather than historical fact. That is, we do not have, and do not really ever expect to have, any concrete physical evidence showing us what actually did happen to create life 3.5 billion years ago or so. Whatever physical evidence of what happened that there even could have been for nano-level chemical reactions would by now be wiped out by billions of years of erosion and chemical reaction and the actions of living organisms themselves. So abiogenesis largely just has to work by taking as a given the general conditions of the early earth and then figure out what plausible mechanisms for creating life there could have been. Even if we find several such mechanisms, and they are all entirely plausible as “the” explanation, we probably cannot definitively prove that any single one was “the” explanation for our planet in particular. We cannot rule out acts of God or aliens or whatever. All we could do is show these deus ex machina explanations to be unecessary.
But in that study, we already seem tantilizingly close: far closer than creationist or ID literature seems to acknowledge. As you can tell from most of their descriptions, they envision the problem as being one of jumping from simple organic compounds to unbelievably complex bacteria: something that would, indeed, be impossible. But then, this concept seems to rely upon the long outdated concept that what we need explain is “life.” “Life” however, is quite a misleading term, since there is no good way to define its boundaries when we get down to simpler and simpler forms. What we are really trying to explain is heredity: reproducing things that can be subject to natural selection, and hence could plausibly evolve into more and more complex forms over time, leaving behind the need for “chance” jumps.
And while creationists are comfortable in their belief that the claimed “tree of life” terminates in bacteria (which are still up to millions of base pairs of genetic information long), the fact is over the last couple of decades scientists have been discovering and exploring whole new realms of… er… “things.” This webpage has a good summary, grouping them all under the heading of “subcellular” (which is what they are).
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/subcellular.html
A disclaimer here: none of these things themselves solve the problem of how simple organic compounds could have been catalyzed into heredity. But they do essentially extend the tree of life much farther down into the depths of simple biochemistry as well as helping to further erode that essentialist shibboleth of “life” as a singular discrete boundary that inorganic matter must somehow climb over into.
And, as this page notes, it’s only even been 7 or so years since we discovered reproducing, evolveable RNA “monsters” with less than 50 base pairs, albiet currently able to live only in a very specific form of artificial environment that includes an enzyme (though, actually, the enzyme is itself all that is necessary: you don’t even need to “seed” it with any RNA for it alone to produce RNA monsters). That’s barely any time at all to digest and further innovate in this area, though lots of interesting work indeed is ongoing.
But regardless of where any specific abiogenetic theory is, or how soon major breakthroughs will be made, the subject for debate here is: what will happen? What will happen if, over the course of the next ten years, we get discovery after discovery, culminating in basically a quite reasonable fleshed out pathway from simple organic compounds to simple life as well as several different experimental simulations that produce rapidly evolving replicators from scratch within plausible environmental conditions?
Will creationism be dealt a deathblow: the last bastion of stubborn resistence essentially breached? Certainly I think there are plenty of people who will soldier on, just as they have in the face of overwhelming evidence for evolution. But it would, I believe, knock most of the popular wind out of the movement.
Furthermore, a majority of religious believers credit their beliefs to the idea that life, and the world, were designed: HAD to be designed. Could a breakthrough in abiogenesis, demonstrating that this sense of “necessity” is essentially empty, deal the same sort of serious blow to the unbiquity of religious belief that Darwin’s theory did in the first place? Certianly it wouldn’t threaten the faiths of people like Kenneth Miller: theists who have no real problem with either evolution or abiogenesis and who’s god is, essentially, much bigger and more “natural law” based than Biblically literalist-based. And like the Catholic Church fairly quickly accomodated evolution, it is certainly possible that the ever adaptable major religions will find ways, perhaps even easily and without much theological discomfort, to take themselves out of conflict with the idea of a spontaneous natural origin for life. But again, just as Darwin made it, as Dawkins noted, viable to be an intellectually satisfied atheist, taking out one of the claimed necessities behind creator beliefs would undoubtedly radically alter religious belief in the world.
