Dumb Paper!

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."

—  Richard Feynman 

This is an embarrassment — a creationist paper published in a somewhat respectable science journal:

"Calculated probabilities for the origin of life are absurdly improbable even when highly favorable assumptions are made. This agrees with the use of 'absurd' for probability statements by Eigen (Eigen) and that Wald (1954) found it necessary to use 'miracles' to justify his use of 'impossible becomes possible'. The origin of life and its evolution cannot be 'explained' by a near-infinite sequence of minute changes given direction via selection by survival of the fittest."

This is yet another example of a common creationist tactic: smuggling the demands of abiogenesis into the discussion of evolution, then declaring evolution disproven because the origin of life remains under investigation.

Just ... no. 

In probability terms, an event with a very low chance per trial can become almost certain if you have enough trials and enough time. Abiogenesis skeptics often treat it as if life had one "roll of the dice," when in reality the early Earth had billions of years, countless chemical environments, and unthinkably large numbers of molecular interactions happening simultaneously.

Not only that, the authors commit the fallacy of the argument from incredulity. 

As University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne wrote: 

"Now creationists have always preyed on ignorance, with their method often being the claim 'We don’t understand how X evolved via evolutionary processes, ergo Darwinism is wrong and creationism must be right.' But time after time, as we’ve seen in cases like the bacterial flagellum that made creationist biologist Michael Behe infamous, evolutionists have been able to find viable precursors to features or organisms once thought impossible to have evolved (here’s one for the flagellum)."

Instead of saying, "We don't yet know, so let's keep looking," they jump to, "We don't know, therefore we do know" — and then fill in the blank with whatever answer they wanted all along.

That's just sloppy thinking, bereft of critical thought and real scientific pursuit. 

Many people confuse Darwin's theory of Natural Selection with how life actually began, and some do it on purpose. They're not the same thing. Natural selection by descent with modification explains how living things change over time once they already exist. Abiogenesis is about how life got started in the first place — how lifeless chemicals somehow assembled into the first living cells. Darwin never claimed to know that part. His work starts after life appears, charting how it adapts, branches, and survives.

Abiogenesis is its own game entirely. It's about the chemistry, physics, and chance events that may have turned simple molecules into something that could reproduce and evolve. Think RNA world ideas, Miller–Urey spark experiments, and the mess of conditions on early Earth. Evolution steps in only once you have a living thing to work with. They meet at the threshold of life's first appearance, but they're not the same process, and knowing one doesn't mean you know the other.

Yet some critics, especially creationists, love to blur the two together so they can knock them both over in one lazy swing. It’s like saying the history of Rome is false because we don’t know who hammered the first nail into the first hut. The fact that abiogenesis is still being unraveled doesn't erase the mountains of evidence for biological evolution. Both are worth studying, but they answer different questions — and lumping them together is deliberate misdirection.

But a "miracle"? 

No — keep searching ...