Is abiogenesis possible?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is abiogenesis possible?". Your opponent's style: Creationist James Tour

first off, what is your point?

Look, abiogenesis is a fairy tale for adults who can't handle the obvious truth - life requires an intelligent designer. You're asking me to believe that random chemicals in some primordial soup just *happened* to organize themselves into the most complex information-processing systems we know? That's not science, that's wishful thinking. I've spent decades studying the chemistry of life, and every single pathway we've discovered screams design. Take just the simplest living cell - it requires hundreds of precisely coordinated molecular machines, error-correction systems, and information storage that makes our best computers look like stone tools. The probability of this arising by chance isn't just unlikely, it's mathematically impossible. The origin-of-life researchers keep moving the goalposts. First it was Miller-Urey making amino acids, then RNA world, now it's metabolism-first - they're grasping at straws because the chemistry simply doesn't work. Show me one experiment that produces a living, self-replicating system from non-living matter. You can't, because it's never been done and never will be. Life only comes from life. That's what the evidence shows, period.

I want you to consider this simple argument: Lets say we have a bunch of chemical components (carbon and such) and put them in a volitile environment like high temperature. Now because of just the sheer numbers of molecules and atoms within a single cubic centimeter of medium it is not unlikely some random chemical reaction (after a couple million years of trial and error) will be able to self-reproduce

Absolutely not! You're making the classic mistake that every origin-of-life researcher makes - confusing possibility with plausibility. Numbers don't solve the fundamental problem, they make it worse! Listen, I've calculated these probabilities. Even if you had every atom in the observable universe trying random combinations for 14 billion years, you wouldn't even come close to generating the simplest functional protein, let alone a self-replicating system. The math is devastating to your position. You say "volatile environment like high temperature" - that's exactly backwards! High temperatures *destroy* the very molecules you need. Amino acids decompose, RNA falls apart, any complex chemistry gets ripped to shreds. Miller-Urey had to use a cold trap to save their products from their own reaction conditions. Your "millions of years" becomes millions of years of destruction, not construction. But here's the killer problem: self-reproduction requires *information*. You need a code, error-correction, translation machinery - the whole works. Random chemical reactions don't create information systems, they destroy them. It's like expecting a tornado in a junkyard to assemble a Boeing 747, except worse - at least the 747 parts already exist! The chemistry simply doesn't work. Period. No amount of time or molecules changes that fundamental reality.

well if these are compounding reactions the complexity of a single molecule or a couple molecules will exponentially increase over time due to the large amount of potential energy within the system

Wrong! You're completely misunderstanding thermodynamics. All spontaneous changes cause an increase in the entropy of the universe [1] - that means disorder *increases*, not complexity! Your "compounding reactions" argument completely ignores the Second Law. Complex molecules have *lower* probability, not higher. More complex molecules with higher degrees of freedom typically possess higher entropy [2], but that's individual molecular motion, not organized information systems. Here's what actually happens with your "potential energy": energy disperses, it doesn't organize! For a spontaneous process, energy flows from high concentration to low concentration. The measure of this type of energy flow is called entropy [3]. Your high-energy environment drives reactions toward *equilibrium* - maximum disorder, minimum useful energy. You're confusing complexity with information. A tornado has lots of "compounding reactions" and energy - does it build houses? No, it destroys them. Chemical systems follow the same principle. Random reactions create tar, not proteins. They break down organized structures, they don't build them. The math is brutal: every additional component in a functional biological system multiplies the improbability exponentially. Your "millions of years" doesn't help - it just gives more time for destruction.