How did life originate without a creator?

How did life originate without a creator?

Life, the beautiful. 

This is a question that has riddled human mind since time immemorial. The question of how life emerged is important, and commands both careful thinking and proper use of logic in answering, until we can be sure of the answer. As such, this is my humble attempt to discuss possible answers to this question.

The evolution of human sense 

Before the advent of the heliocentric universe, people used to believe what they apparently saw everyday, that the earth is static and all cosmic bodies such as planets, sun, moon etc. are constantly revolving around it (and are way smaller than the earth anyway). The sky was the limit of both the vision and imaginability of the human mind. And needless to mention is that, the earth was considered flat.

However, the Greeks first observer that when distant ships used to apprach ports and harbors, first their highest points were seen, followed gradually by other parts. This made them reconsider their earlier line of thinking. With time, man ultimately realized that the earth is round, and not flat. A greater question arose then, what exactly is the position of man in the universe? First, earth was considered the centre of the universe, but very soon, great thinkers and mathematicians like Aryabhata I of India started question this very notion. Aryabhata finally published his own heliocentric model of the universe, as early as around 499 B.C. The west however, continued to follow Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe.

One reason behind the tremendous success of Ptolemy's model was that, it was very accurate in making predictions. As per this model, everything in the sky, including the sun, moon, planets and stars, actually orbitted the earth in circles, which were often themselves orbitting as parts of bigger circles. This way, although mathematical elegance was reached, the model itself was rather difficult and complicated to grasp.

Finally, Copernicus established his heliocentric model of the cosmos, replacing the earth with the sun as the centre of the visible universe. And it incorporated the exact mathematical accurary of Ptolemy's idea, while making the very loci of motion of planets and stars much simpler. The earth then became a part of a great system, the solar system. This was the first blow to the human sense, which apparently considered our home planet to be centre.

Years later, the findings of Galileo established that the earth was far smaller compared to the sun in size and volume. A concrete idea of the solar system gradually followed. And finally, the findings of astronomers revealed that the solar system itself is but a minute component of a much larger system, the Milky Way galaxy. And even then the search wasn't stopped. Before the 1930s, people used to believe that the Milky Way by itself was the entirely of the visible universe. But the findings of Hubble changed this very idea, helping us realize that the Milky Way is nothing more than one of the innumerable galaxies constituting the entirely the cosmic ocean.

You might be wondering what exactly is the size of the universe then. A simple analogy is that, if the sun is about the size of a grain of sand, then the Milky Way galaxy is the size of entire China! Thus, we see that we are nothing but a miniscule of sand, constituting the seemingly infinitely extent of the desert called the cosmoc.

The origin of life 

Now that we know about our true size in space, let us take a look on how life actually originated. And for this purpose, as Stephen Hawking states so elegantly, our very home planet earth can serve as a handbook or reference.

The vast complexity of the society today can be essentially
explained as the integration of simpler processes resulting
in the very same, over a grand scale of time. 

Of how life actually originated on earth, there are a multitude of different theories. One theory states, as a part of the philosophy of vitalism, that there must have been a sort of vital force of nature which developed life. But honestly, this idea is rather old-fashioned, and is as good as thrown away. Another theory mentions the possibility of the elements of life being circulated in the universe by comets. While it might sound far-fetched, I guess it does have a point. But in my opinion, and that of so many around me, the most logical theory of the origin of life is Oparin-Haldane theory, put forward by Alexander Oparin and J.B.S Haldane. As per this theory, life originated as a result of chemical combinations and interactions between organic molecules on earth.

We know that the earth emerged from the sun, and it is commonly accepted that the sun is a second-generation star. So, by the process of nucleosynthesis, elements heavier than the fundamental constituents of the universe, namely hydrogen and helium, were gradually produced by the stars. Stated elegantly by Fred Hoyle, this theory brilliantly explained how carbon, the very basis of life, actually evolved from the stars. And as such, the earth being a part of the sun, received its fair share of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and other elements in abundance from it.

DNA, the real cause of life. 

One of the many fascinating properties of carbon is its ability to form long chains with itself, which is also called catentation. This, combined with tetravalency of the element, resulted into the creation of thousands and millions of organic compounds gradually, with time. The energy of the sun, in the form of heat and light, got trapped inside the earth because of greenhouse effect in the early days of our planet, and this energy thus excited molecules of carbon and other elements to combine, and form different compounds. Gradually, over a long time, a number of simple organic compounds were developed. And then, these simple stable compounds started interactions amongst themselves, and organized to form larger yet stable organic compounds. This process repeated till the formation of sufficiently complex organic molecules.

These organic molecules then interacted and gave rise to the ancestor of DNA, a compound called RNA (Ribonucleic acid), which had the ability to replicate itself, i.e develop more copies of itself. And finally DNA emerged. This DNA can, in a way, be hailed as the most important driving force behind life. Because of DNA and its continued replication (since DNA is itself stable, all its copies were stable as well), more complex and stable substances were formed. And over another period of long time, the earliest living organisms such as Amoeba were formed.

Now came the process of evolution. These initially formed living organisms were stable, i.e they could exist and replicate themselves. But over time, because of exposure to different environmental conditions, a group of these organisms developed unique traits. These traits, over replication, gave rise of other, more complex species. It is to be remembered that the origin of a new species from an existing one does not necessarily mean the extinction of the previous species. That is why we can still find these primitive organisms even today.

And over time, WE emerged, the human beings, the true rulers of planet earth, capable of questioning the cause of our own existence.

Is life an accident? 

Our true ancestor. The real 'Manu' of Hinduism, or 'Adam'
of the Old Testament. :)

Let us understand this question at first. Life, as we have seen, is the resultant of random interactions between simpler, abiotic (non-living) factors over a large span of time. In a way, life is truly an accident. But this sort of accident, though numerically rare, is still quite common across the grand scale of the cosmos, simply because of the law of large numbers.

What exactly is the law of large numbers? Consider a random number generator software (truly random), that can generate any number between 1 and 100. Suppose the password to your computer is 13575313. So, if you go on executing the generator over and over, for days and months and years, you'll most certainly find that at some instance, the software exactly produced the numbers 1,3,4,5,3,1,3 in succession. This does not necessarily mean that there might be some god or deity toying with your software. It simply means that, given enough time and number of attempts, even the rarest results can be found.

Likewise, the interactions between molecules resulted in the emergence of life. And this was thus an accident.

Thus, we can at least conclude that even without an intelligent creator, there are chances of emergence of life. And from life, intelligent life can originate over the years, through evolution.