Answers Magazine
Answers magazine is the Bible-affirming, creation-based magazine from Answers in Genesis. In it you will find fascinating content and stunning photographs that present creation and worldview articles along with relevant cultural topics from different authors. Each quarterly issue includes a detachable chart, a pullout children’s magazine, a unique animal highlight, excellent layman and semi-technical articles plus bonus content from the AnswersMagazine.com website. Our purpose is to equip you, our reader, with practical answers so you can confidently communicate the gospel and biblical authority with accuracy. Why wait? Subscribe today!
Putting a frog in a blender?
Creation Archive > Volume 16 Issue 4 > Putting a frog in a blender?
 |  |  |
 | First published: Creation ex nihilo 16(4):6 September 1994 |  |
 |  |  |
Putting a frog in a blender? No, I don't want you to try it. I'm rather fond of frogs. I'm only trying to make an easy-to-understand point about a very important part of this whole creation/evolution business.
You see, some people think that life is only a matter of the raw materials — the right ingredients, so to speak. Kids in school often get the impression that life could have arisen by itself a long time ago, as long as there was the right mix of chemicals and a bit of energy.
So let's do a thought experiment. What if someone had put a frog in a blender? Here we would have the ideal primordial soup from which to run an origin-of-life experiment. It doesn't contain only a few simple building blocks — it contains all sorts of complicated chemicals, like DNA, proteins, and more.
Now imagine that this 'soup' is zapped with any type of energy you like — shake it, heat it, pass sparks through it, put it in the sun — anything at all. Not only will it never reassemble itself into anything like the frog it once was, but you can be absolutely, totally, positive that no living, reproducing organism, not even the tiniest, will ever assemble itself from these ingredients.
The reason is obvious — life is more than having all the right ingredients in the 'soup'.
The ingredients have to be assembled in the right order according to an intelligent plan. When that frog was conceived, born and grew up, its 'ingredients' were assembled according to the intelligent plan already programmed in its parents' genes (DNA) — which in turn came from their parents, and so on. But that plan, that programming, is not there in the raw ingredients which make up a frog — that's why it will not spontaneously re-form after being 'blended'.
The most scientific conclusion one could come to is that the first living creatures required an outside intelligence to put them together and to write the programs to pass on to their descendants. The (hypothetical) frog in the blender shows that even given the most suitable possible raw materials, without an intelligent plan there is no hope that the machinery of life will arise. No matter how much or how long it is 'zapped'.
Help keep these daily articles coming. Find out how to support AiG.
