Physicist Paul Davies, the author of The Goldilocks Enigma¸which highlighted the unique fine-tuning of or planet for life, has now written a new book on life itself. The Demon in the Machine relates how the scientific study of life has shifted from focusing on life as a complex chemical system to an information processing system. This makes life even more complex than we might have imagined, and surely renders purely naturalistic explanations for the origins of life even more implausible.

The existence of life is absolutely extraordinary. As far as we know there is no other life in the universe. Earth seems to be uniquely designed for life, and any tiny difference in multiple variables would have made life impossible even here. Science has shown that even the apparently most simple life is extraordinarily complex. Yet despite all of this compelling evidence, the vast majority of people seem to be taken in by the naturalist myth that life emerged by pure chance, and reject the Biblical claim that it is rather the result of the actions of a sovereign creator God.

Physicist Paul Davies, the author of The Goldilocks Enigma¸which highlighted the unique fine-tuning of or planet for life, has now written a new book on life itself. The Demon in the Machine relates how the scientific study of life has shifted from focusing on life as a complex chemical system to an information processing system. This makes life even more complex than we might have imagined, and surely renders purely naturalistic explanations for the origins of life even more implausible.

Lewis Dartnell, professor at the University of Westminster, reviewed the book for the Times  and explains that life breaks the second law of thermodynamics:

 “That law states, in its simplest terms, that any closed system must become more disordered over time. Yet the processes of life seem to flout this rule flagrantly. Even a single-celled bacterium is fabulously complicated on a molecular scale and is able to maintain this complexity in a turbulent environment. The first life on Earth must have arisen out of a primordial mush of chemicals, and every human alive today – each of us a construct of about 30 trillion cells with specific roles – developed from a single fertilised egg. Life absolutely excels at conjouring order out of chaos.”

These comments reveal the deep blindness of human unbelief to the obvious. It seems extraordinary that anyone can believe that the complexity of life could emerge by chance form a “primordial mush of chemicals.” At the very least it is clear that this is not a scientifically proven proposition, but speculation (“must have”) driven by a refusal to countenance the more plausible alternative, namely intelligent design/creation by a personal God.

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