Origin of life

About

The creation of life is a colloquial phrase referring to both of the following:

• the event in which life first emerged from nonliving substances on Earth
• the means by which different species came to exist

Science

The general name for the process by which life can emerge from nonliving substances, wherever and whenever it may occur (i.e. not just on Earth and not necessarily our tree of life), is abiogenesis.

The means by which more complex forms can derive from simpler ones is called evolution; the evidence-based explanation for the emergence of present-day species from the first organisms on Earth is evolution by natural selection.

The question of how life was created is one of several key "creation" questions which form the core of many mythologies and for which science has begun to provide likely answers only fairly recently.

Mythology

Most mythologies include a story explaining the origins of non-supernatural life on Earth. These stories almost universally presume that present-day species emerged in essentially their current forms, and hence assume no evolution; the creation of life is the same as the creation of species.

These stories also usually involve the existence of some supernatural life-form ("gods" such as Thor, or a monotheistic "God"), although in some cases the story is more that "it just happened". Norse mythology, for example, says that the first two organisms were Ymir (a "frost giant") and a snow-white cow, both of whom happened to emerge from Ginungagap, the great swirling of frost at the beginning of the universe. These two organisms then gave rise to further organisms by similar "happenings".

Creationism

The predominant mythologies of the industrial and information ages, the Abrahamic monotheisms (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), all hold that a supernatural being called "God" created everything, including the universe, the Earth, life, and humanity.

In the face of scientific evidence showing more credible explanations for these events, modern Abrahamists tend to argue that while it is still literally true that God created all of these things, his role remains hidden from scientific observation in that he is the reason why the laws of physics work as they do and the direct cause of key events not yet observed, such as the first organism (or the first self-replicating molecule).

Many Abrahamists, however, insist that scripture (the Bible, the Qur'an, or the Torah) must be taken literally. Where such insistence clearly violates the available evidence, these beliefs are called creationism.

Christian creationists hold that the creation of life is accurately described in the Biblical Book of Genesis, with God literally creating the first animals and humans from raw materials. (Presumably Jewish creationists would agree with this, insofar as the Book of Genesis is also found in the Jewish Torah. Fortunately, there do not seem to be very many Jewish creationists; Jewish fundamentalists seem to focus more on other issues.)