Dr. Ramón Argila de Torres y Sandoval
March 11, 2026
There’s an old joke about a scientist boldly walking up to God saying,
“We don’t need you anymore. We’ve figured it out. We can now create life from dirt. .”
God says, “Is that so? Show me.”
The scientist reaches down to scoop up a handful of dirt.
God says, “Excuse me. Make your own dirt.”
That joke is actually a precise theological argument dressed as humor:
It exposes the fundamental sleight of hand in the entire materialist evolution based project. The scientist:
- Borrows existing matter
- Borrows existing natural laws
- Borrows existing chemistry
- Borrows existing intelligence and reason to conduct the experiment
- And then claims to have explained origins
Is that so? Show me:
- It opens with the full arrogance of the claim — we don’t need you anymore. That’s the actual materialist position stated honestly.
- The scientist reaching for the dirt is the unconscious confession — he never even hesitates, never notices what he’s doing
- The “show me” is God being entirely reasonable — not threatened, not defensive. Amused.
- The punchline lands on that moment — not on the science, not on the argument, but on the unexamined assumption underneath everything
The scientist hasn’t demonstrated anything. He’s just rearranged what was already there. The explanation keeps getting pushed back one step — and that step is always quietly borrowed from somewhere that’s never accounted for. It is the chicken or the egg all dressed up.
The Standard Layered Problem
The origin of life question has a known structure of nested “but before that…” problems:
- How did complex organisms arise from simple ones? (Evolution — relatively well understood)
- How did the first replicating cell arise? (Very poorly understood)
- How did RNA or DNA arise from chemistry? (Partially explored, deeply contested)
- How did amino acids and nucleotides form? (Miller-Urey, hydrothermal vents — plausible mechanisms exist)
- How did the homochirality problem resolve? (Nearly totally open — life uses only left-handed amino acids, right-handed sugars, and we have no satisfying abiotic explanation)
The racemate point is sharp: every lab experiment that “creates” life’s building blocks under “primordial conditions” requires a scientist choosing the flask, the temperature, the voltage. The intelligence is smuggled in through the experimental design. You can’t bootstrap your way out of that. Chicken or the egg, again.
Who made the dirt:
It’s the same problem as the racemate lab creation reversal — the moment you control the conditions you’ve introduced intelligence. But this goes deeper. Even before the intelligence question, even before the homochirality question — Where did the dirt come from?
Leibniz asked it most cleanly — “why is there something rather than nothing?” Every materialist origin story starts with something already existing and works forward. None of them touch that question. They can’t. It’s outside the frame of what science as a discipline can address.
Now we’ve exited biology entirely and entered cosmogony. The dirt — the heavy elements, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, all the stuff life needs — has its own origin story:
- Hydrogen and helium came from the Big Bang
- Everything heavier than lithium was forged in stellar cores — nuclear fusion under gravitational pressure
- The heaviest elements (gold, uranium, iodine) came from neutron star collisions
- Earth’s “dirt” is literally the ash of dead stars, scattered by supernovae, gravitationally collapsed into a new solar system
So the dirt is explainable — but only by pushing the question back further.
Where did the stars come from?
Gravitational collapse of hydrogen clouds. Where did the hydrogen come from? The Big Bang. Where did the Big Bang come from? Here the regression hits a wall.
Current physics cannot describe the moment at or before t=0. The equations break down. You get a singularity — which is physics’ way of saying “our model fails here.” Proposals exist:
- Eternal inflation — our Big Bang is one bubble in an endless sea of inflating spacetime
- Cyclic cosmology — universes collide and bounce (Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology)
- Quantum fluctuation from nothing — but “nothing” in quantum mechanics is not truly nothing; it’s a vacuum with structure and laws
- A prior cause — which is where theology has historically planted its flag
Where did it come from?
Now we’re identifying something that doesn’t get said clearly enough: every materialist origin story either:
- Regresses infinitely (what caused the cause of the cause…)
- Terminates in brute fact (“it just exists/existed”)
- Terminates in a necessary being — something that doesn’t need a cause because its existence is its nature (the classical cosmological argument)
And option 3 doesn’t escape cleanly either — you can always ask “but where did that come from?”
What this actually shows
The regression being pointed at isn’t a gap in our knowledge which science will eventually fill. It’s a structural feature of causal explanation itself. Any chain of causes either:
- Goes back forever (which raises the question of whether an infinite regress can constitute an explanation at all), or
- Starts somewhere uncaused
This is why the question “where did the dirt come from” is not a scientific question with a scientific answer. It’s a question about the metaphysical status of existence itself — why is there something rather than nothing, and why does that something have the specific character that permits life?
Science can trace the chain backward with extraordinary precision. But it cannot explain why there is a chain at all.
Proof of Concept or Design:
Miller-Urey found this out in their experiment, and yet, problems and all, it’s still in textbooks as a success story dressed up as chemistry.
The “proof of concept” claim has genuine problems:
The logic is essentially: “We intelligently designed an experiment, carefully selected the inputs, controlled the conditions, and got amino acids; therefore, unguided chemistry could do this naturally.” That’s a strange inference. The intelligence was baked in from the start, so it can’t be used as evidence against the need for intelligence.
The gap problem is staggering:
Even granting every favorable assumption:
- Amino acids → proteins requires specific sequencing (astronomically unlikely at random)
- Proteins alone aren’t life — you need information storage (DNA/RNA)
- DNA/RNA can’t replicate without proteins, but proteins can’t be made without DNA/RNA — a chicken-and-egg problem with no clean naturalistic solution
- All of this would need a membrane, energy systems, error-correction mechanisms — controlled by an information system, simultaneously
The information problem may be the deepest issue.
Any intelligently designed experiment produces end products, even in failure. So though Miller-Urey have been lauded over time… it is much ado about nothing. Even if they had succeeded and a cell line now sits bubbling in beakers inside a dark basement of the University of Chicago, several thousand generations removed — all it would have proved is life needs guidance and intelligent design to succeed.
Life isn’t just chemistry — it’s specified, functional information. We have no demonstrated mechanism by which unguided processes generate novel functional information. Every analogy we know (books, code, language, music) traces back to a mind.
The argument inverts itself regardless of outcome:
- If Miller-Urey fails to produce life — it demonstrates how difficult and unlikely abiogenesis is
- If Miller-Urey succeeds in producing life — it demonstrates that life requires intelligent design, controlled conditions, and deliberate guidance
There’s no version of the experiment that actually supports the conclusion it’s often cited for. It’s a heads I win, tails you lose situation — except the experimenters don’t realize they’re on the losing side of their own logic.
The deeper point being made is that the experiment is essentially self-defeating as an argument for unguided abiogenesis. The very act of designing it smuggles in the thing it’s supposed to disprove.
It’s similar to someone arguing that a painting could paint itself — and as evidence, they carefully mix pigments, select a canvas, guide a brush, and produce a painting. The demonstration proves the opposite of the intended point.
What it really showed at best is that with intelligence, intention, controlled environments, and careful inputs — you can get some amino acids. Which is interesting chemistry. But as a philosophical argument for life emerging without guidance, it was arguably never coherent to begin with.
The honest assessment is that the origin of life remains deeply mysterious, and the confident dismissal of design inferences often rests more on philosophical commitment than on actual evidence.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1