The irony of a two-party political system whose members spend the majority of their time shooting holes in each other�s policies is that it becomes abundantly clear to everyone beyond the fray that neither side knows what the hell it is talking about. Yet those standing outside the science-religion fray do not grow belligerent and say, "You're both wrong. An idiot can see that. Find another explanation." No! In this emotionally charged atmosphere nearly everyone seems compelled to choose one side or the other, as if seeking a more objective middle ground would somehow cause instant annihilation. Such is the psychological toll wrought on all of us by the take-no-prisoners attitude of the two sides battling for our hearts and minds regarding this issue.
We must assign a name to those who believe life spontaneously sprang into existence from a mass of inorganic chemicals floating about in the early Earth's prebiotic seas. Let's call them "Darwinists," a term often used for that purpose. Darwinists have dealt themselves a difficult hand to play because those prebiotic seas had to exist at a certain degree of coolness for the inorganic chemicals floating in them to bind together into complex molecules.
Anyone who has taken high school chemistry knows that one of the best ways to break chemical bonds is to heat them.
Given that well-known reality, Darwinists quickly postulated that the first spark of life would no doubt have ignited itself sometime after the continental threshold was reached around 2.5 billion years ago. At that point land would have existed as land and seas would have existed as seas, though not in nearly the same shapes we know them today. But the water in those seas would have been cool enough to allow the chemical chain reactions required by "spontaneous animation." So among Darwinists there arose a broad consensus that the spontaneous animation of life had to have occurred (again, because they do not allow for the possibility of outside intervention, divine or extraterrestrial), and it had to have occurred no earlier than the continental threshold of 2.5 billion years ago.
These assumptions were believed and taught worldwide with a fervor that leaves religious fundamentalists green with envy. Furthermore, they were taught as facts because that is what science inevitably does. It reaches a consensus about a set of assumptions in a field it has not fully mastered, then those assumptions are believed as dogma and taught as facts until the real facts become known. Sometimes such consensus "facts" endure for a short time (Isaac Newtons assumption that the speed of light was a relative measure lasted only 200 years), while others endure like barnacles on the underside of our awareness (the universe doggedly expands beyond every finite measure given for it).
In the same way Newtons fluctuating speed of light was overturned by Albert Einsteins theory of relativity, the continental threshold origin of life was blown out of the water, so to speak, by discoveries in the 1970's that indicated life's origins were much older than anticipated. So old, in fact, it went back nearly to the point of coalition, 4.5 billion years ago, when the Sun had ignited and the protoplanets had taken the general shapes and positions they maintain today.
Ultimately, 4.0 billion years became the new starting point for life on Earth, based on fossilized stromatolites discovered in Australia that dated to 3.6 billion years old.
For Darwinists that meant going from the frying pan into the fire, literally, because at 4.0 billion years ago the proto-Earth was nothing but a seething cauldron of lava, cooling lava, and steam, about as far from an incubator for incipient life as could be imagined. In short, right out of the gate, at the first crack of the bat, Charles Darwin was, as they say in the south, a blowed-up peckerwood.
