Abiogenesis

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From Dr Sarfati's testimony, http://creation.com/now-a-creationist-jonathan-sarfati , an excerpt pertaining to abiogenesis,

Real chemistry vs chemical evolution

In my organic chemistry classes, the real chemistry learned there seemed to pose enormous problems for theories of the origin of life from non-living chemicals (chemical evolution or abiogenesis). And if evolution couldn’t start in the first place, then it couldn’t have got going. It would be like a race with all runners dead on the starting blocks.

For example, we studied a type of reaction vital for life and chemical industry called condensation polymerization. This is where lots of small molecules (monomers) are combined to form big molecules (polymers), releasing water molecules at every step. Such reactions can go the other way, a process called hydrolysis: water plus polymer produces monomers. A basic chemical law tells us that water is the last place we would want to try condensation reactions; rather, it would help break up big molecules. Yet the text books told us that life began in a primordial soup, which contains rather a lot of water! (3)

Diagram of chirality.

Also, theory—as well as plenty of practice in chemistry labs—taught us that reactions won’t always go the way you want—chemicals want to react in other ways as well. For example, although life needs both sugars and amino acids, unless they are kept apart (e.g. by the cell’s architecture), they will react and destroy each other. This in fact happens during bruising of fruit and cooking. Also, real chemists recognize the danger, and attach ‘protecting groups’ to stop certain reactions, then remove them. The alleged primordial soup didn’t have any chemists around!

Another interesting fact we learned was that many chemicals of life came in two ‘mirror image’ forms, rather like your left and right hand (hence the term ‘chirality’ from the Greek word for ‘hand’, cheir χεὶρ). Yet life contained only one of them. A single impurity could destroy the DNA double helix or protein activity. But when we made such chemicals, they always arose in a 50/50 mix. We managed to separate them using one-handed forms obtained from living things, which helped to crystallize one of the forms we were after. This was quite involved. But once we had the needed one-handed form, it was very easy to revert it to the 50/50 mixture, e.g. just adding charcoal. So there was a huge problem with the primordial soup idea: it would produce the 50/50 mixture, not the pure one-handed forms needed for life.4

It was Darwin's work, more then anyone else, while (maybe even against Darwin his own better judgement) which promoted the idea that really silly simple things could become organized into increasingly more sophisticated systems by having only strictly natural forces acting upon them.

This idea was embraced by the anti-religious groups of the late 19th century and it quickly became the origin myth of the secular non-theistic community that developed as a quite natural outcome of having a separation of church and state and freedom of conviction. In practical terms freedom of conviction means your religion is irrelevant; You may belief whatever you want as long as you don't take it too seriously.

From The Great War (World War One) (especially after the atrocities of the Second World War) onward you see a steady increase in people who have no religious affiliation. This idea of self-organization has become very popular mostly trough social change, not actual scientific evidence.

After 150 years the scientific question still remains if self-organization is truly possible. We can still only offer examples of self-ordering though strictly natural forces; We have never seen something like self-organizaton without intelligence hiding somewhere as the driving force.

The only reason we even consider abiogenesis is because of this general idea that many people take for granted that physical systems can self-organize. Even though we have no evidence beyond self-ordering.

The difference between self-ordering and self-organization is not hard to understand: The ordering we see in self-ordering phenomena is derived from the preceding less-ordered physical system. Organization requires information which cannot be derived from the preceding physical system. Ordering always follows as a direct consequence from the physical properties of the parts; whereas organization can only be imposed upon the physical system. So even though organization is consistent with the physical properties of the system it cannot appear by itself from a less organized system.

As usually most people are not as precise with the usage of such terms and there is some confusion. There is a strong tendency to equivocation, which can result in people just not seeing the difference. And naturally denying any difference exists.

Others like Stuart Kauffman propose additional laws of thermodynamics to explain a phenomenon which has never empirically been observed; Only because it became so popular as an essential part of the current cultural and social paradigm is it assumed to be correct. The existence of life itself is seen as evidence. This results in a rather interesting problem: As far as true self-organization is assumed as a physical, strictly natural phenomenon, it seems to strangely only apply to life and to occur only with regard to life, filling all the gaps between hypotheses and reality. Outside of life no examples of self-organization are ever found.