Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 366
ORIGIN OF LIFE – DIFFERENT THEORIES AND PROPOSITIONS atmosphere around the earth as it existed for three and a half billion years before the origin of life. The atmosphere at that time is believed to be anoxic lacking free unlocked oxygen. No form of life which depends on metabolism for the release of energy through oxidation could have survived in such an atmosphere. In fact the absence of oxygen was an essential prerequisite for the synthesis of organic material from inorganic chemicals. . Hence by design, as we believe, or by accident as the secular scientist will have it, it so happened that during the first three and a half billion years of the age of the earth, the atmosphere remained oxygen-free. There was no protective ozone layer in the stratosphere either. The chemical materials which must have been the precursors to stable forms of organic chemicals had to evolve without oxygen: 'J. B. S. Haldane, the British biochemist, seems to have been the first to appreciate that a reducing atmosphere one with no free oxygen, was a requirement for the evolution of life from nonliving organic matter. " 1. The absence of an ozone layer must have facilitated the high energy radiation blasts from the cosmos to reach the earth and ocean surfaces uninterrupted. The bombardment of this intense cosmic energy became largely instrumental in the creation of pre-biotic organisms which helped the transfer of material from inorganic to organic. . The synthesis from inorganic chemicals in the oceans into preliminary organic chemicals such as amino acids was initially triggered off by the cosmic radiation in an anoxic atmosphere. This chemical reaction started from simple inorganic molecules such as water, carbon dioxide and ammonia. As this process advanced, according to Haldane, 355