Panspermia

The concept of panspermia was first introduced to me by National Lampoon in the form of a joke–one issue of the magazine contained a description of a new version of the video game Space Invaders in which players are encouraged to “knock down the invading sperm from space before they knock up your little sister.”

Well, I laughed. I don’t apologize for my often bizarre sense of humor.

In my opinion, one ought to be able to admit that the idea of extraterrestrial sperm coming from outer space to create life on Earth is pretty funny. What’s even funnier is panspermia is actually a scientific hypothesis that mostly exists because of a mathematics problem, created by the foolish assumption of secular-minded scientists that creation can come to exist without a Creator.

After DNA was discovered, calculations were performed to determine low long it would take “Nature” to produce a double helix without intelligent help. Even the most optimistic projections could not explain how life came to exist so quickly after the Earth was created (approximately 4 billion years ago). The same experts say that the earliest forms of life appeared on Earth 3.6 billion years ago, only 400 million years later. The mathematics problem associated with the origin of life on Earth stems from calculations of how long experts have estimated it would take for DNA to form by luck and random chance. The most optimistic estimates require a lot more time than four hundred million years.

Because the universe is many billions of years older than Earth, by invoking panspermia and proclaiming the origin of life may have come from an extra-terrestrial source, several billion more years of time become available that might allow for the accidental animation of matter that later comes to Earth from another planet, perhaps even another galaxy.

However, moving the problem away from Earth doesn’t really solve anything. It only buys more time. It also creates new problems in the process. For example, in outer space and unprotected by Earth’s atmosphere, living organisms would be exposed to harmful radiation that could easily kill it. Therefore, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, proposed a hypothesis called directed panspermia which calls for an alien civilization to bring DNA to Earth via spaceship.

For the sake of argument, consider what is required to believe in some variation of panspermia. Life still had to begin somewhere, somehow. All you’ve done is buy more time for the miracle of life to occur, but this new, unknown source of life still needs just the right combination of ingredients in the form of natural resources. Somehow, life must create itself on this alien planet, then somehow find its way safely to Earth. At some point, doesn’t it become easier simply to admit, “God exists!” Isn’t the directed panspermia argument analogous to a strange, godless form of intelligent design argument?

If G. K. Chesterton wasn’t literally inspired by the hypothesis of panspermia to write, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything,” he certainly could have been.

Living cells require special molecules called lipids and enzymes in order to exist. Indeed, biology textbooks have decreed that life cannot exist without enzymes. The question is, can enzymes exist without life? It’s sort of another which came first/the chicken-or-the-egg problem.

Moving the origin of life problem away from Earth doesn’t really resolve any of the difficult problems associated with abiogenesis except for the math problem involving the Earth itself. Nor does it solve the more important problems of creating a universe capable of producing the exact set of raw material necessary for life to exist, nor does it explain the process of how non-organic matter became animated.

Directed panspermia is a superior hypothesis to undirected only because it supposes intelligence is ultimately responsible for encoding DNA and creating the first living organism, but the hypothesis still makes the crucial mistake of limiting that intelligence to the constraints of our universe. Such a supposition creates an infinite regress–who assembled the alien’s DNA?

At some point, we find ourselves relying on an obviously created (but superior) form of intelligence to explain the existence of our own intelligence, because we know the universe itself is a product of creation. Yet no matter how smart we might want to believe ET might be, we cannot give them credit for the creation of the universe in which they live. Only a supernatural creator God who exists outside of our space and time solves all of these complex existential problems. The Creator of this universe simply can’t possibly be a mere extraterrestrial, even if we should assume ET exists. Not even a supernatural Creator can exist inside of a created universe prior to creating it.

Therefore, we may safely conclude that God is extra-universal, meaning not of this universe.