Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown.
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28. Chemical Elements of Life
The chemical evolution of life, as you will see in the next few pages, is ridiculously improbable. What could improve the odds? One should begin with an earth having high concentrations of the key elements comprising life, such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen.a However, the more closely one examines these elements, the more unlikely evolution appears.
Carbon. Rocks that supposedly preceded life have very little carbon.b One must imagine a toxic, carbon-rich atmosphere to supply the needed carbon if life evolved. For comparison, today’s atmosphere holds only 1/80,000 of the carbon that has been on the earth’s surface since the first fossils formed. [See Table 6 on page 237.]
Oxygen. No evolutionary theory has been able to explain why earth’s atmosphere has so much oxygen. Too many substances should have absorbed oxygen on an evolving earth.c Besides, if the early earth had oxygen in its atmosphere, compounds (called amino acids) needed for life to evolve would have been destroyed by oxidation.d But if there had been no oxygen, there would have been no ozone (a form of oxygen) in the upper atmosphere. Without ozone to shield the earth, the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation would quickly destroy life.e The only known way for both ozone and life to be here is for both to come into existence simultaneously—in other words, by creation.
Nitrogen. Clays and various rocks absorb nitrogen. Had millions of years passed before life evolved, the sediments that preceded life should be filled with nitrogen. Searches have never found such sediments.f
Basic chemistry does not support the evolution of life.g