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Science and the Divine Origin of Life
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12543 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
4,213 Words |
| Author
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Roy Abraham Varghese
Roy Abraham Varghese is the editor of Truth, an
international, interdisciplinary journal of Christian thought.
He resides in Dallas, Texas. |
N. Chandra Wickramasinghe is professor and department chairman of applied mathematics and astronomy at the University College of Cardiff, Wales. Books he has written include Solid State Physics (with D.J. Morgan, 1975), Fundamental Studies and the Future of Science (1984), Evolution from Space (with Fred Hoyle, 1984), and Living Comets (1985). The author conducted this interview at Wickramasinghe's home in Cardiff. - Ed.
Could you give a brief account of the work you did along with Sir Fred Hoyle on the "Origin of Life" and of the main conclusions you reached in your work?
This work really began some twenty years ago when we had set out to understand the composition and the chemical make-up of tiny dust grains that are known to be present in space in really vast quantities. At the time that we started research into this matter, the general belief was that these dust particles, which show up as patches of obscuration in the Milky Way, are made up of tiny ice grains, rather similar to the ice grains that one sees in the cumulus clouds in the atmosphere of the earth. But it was clear from the start of our investigation that this particular theory of the grains could not be right. It did not fit the data. And we found, one the other hand, that particles of carbonaceous character came much nearer in producing all the observed effects. So that was the first step: unraveling the nature of the dust particles. We found that they were not ice as astronomers had felt them to be, but particles that had a large carbon content.
The research work from that time on had been to focus on the nature of the carbonaceous material in the dust grains. This was a long, tedious process lasting many years. It was only about five years ago that we realized that the dust had to be not merely carbon, not simply carbonaceous, but it had to be biological in character. There was no other way to explain a whole lot of astronomical data except to say that the dust grains in space had essentially to be connected with life. And the marvelous agreement that we obtained with the astronomical data on how starlight is blacked out by dust clouds and so on gave us great confidence that this had to be correct.
We next looked at the conventional story of how life originated on the earth. This had been around for a good many years, the general belief that life has to originate on the surface of our planet from some kind of primordial soup which developed in the very early days of the earth's history. Now, if you think about this proposition, there is no
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