For life to arise spontaneously out of inorganic matter, basic building blocks such as amino acids (precursors to proteins and enzymes), sugars (precursors to carbohydrates), glycerol and fatty acids (precursors to lipids), and nucleotides (precursors to DNA and RNA) must first form.
 
Amino Acids and Proteins
 
Within living organisms, chains of amino acids form proteins that comprise enzymes, the catalysts that drive life's machinery. All the components of life could be present, but without enzymes, nothing further would happen other than Second Law degradation.
 
However, the spontaneous formation of enzymes would violate nature's laws. Here's how:
 
1. Chemicals (carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur) that comprise amino acids can form millions of molecules other than amino acids. Although a few amino acids have formed in experiments attempting to duplicate imagined early Earth conditions favorable to forming amino acids, an intelligently designed experiment proves intelligence, not spontaneity. Nevertheless, such experiments are used as proof of the spontaneous generation of life. But even then, an amino acid is not life any more than a water molecule is. Compounding the problem further is the fact that if any of the 500 or so amino acids found in life were to form spontaneously in the early Earth, they would then need to find one another to link up in a very specific way to form enzymes. The probability of this happening is way beyond the limit of possibility of one chance in 10¹⁵⁰.
 
2. Amino acids can exist in either right- or left-handed forms (called D- and L- enantiomers). They are mirror images of each other. Approximately a 50:50 mix forms in laboratory amino acid syntheses. That's also what would have occurred (if it ever really did occur) in the broths nestled on the lightning scorched volcanic landscape at the dawn of prehistory. But life's proteins are not composed of a mixture of D- (dextro) and L- (levo) amino acid enantiomers. They are almost exclusively left-handed (levo, L-). Spontaneous chemistry cannot account for this.

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3. Proteins are not just straight strings of amino acids. They have a secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure that arises as the string twists and folds upon itself to create a three-dimensional form. This folded, globular-like structure is critical to function. In living organisms, once the primary amino acid strings form, they take on a mind of their own and proceed to fold into a specific three-dimensional shape in a matter of seconds or minutes. This folded structure is critical because it exposes reactive sites in specific positions on the surface to permit specific biological and catalytic functions.
 
Even a tiny protein of a hundred amino acids has potentially trillions of folded forms. But only one shape will do in living organisms. This specificity defies explanation by random spontaneous processes. It is known as the Levinthal paradox.

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The importance of proper folding is manifest in diseases. For example, brain proteins that fold wrong create prion diseases (transmissible spongiform encephalopathies) such as mad cow disease, sheep scrapie, chronic wasting disease in deer, Kuru, fatal familial insomnia, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Other diseases and degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's, dementia, and Parkinson's are also related to aberrant protein folding.
 
The propensity of proteins to fold and stick together creates the threat of amyloid formation (the default option) if chaperone proteins are not simultaneously present to orchestrate the proper folding. When beta-amyloids lose the three-dimensional conformation that hides their sticky parts, they become insoluble and toxic. In the brain, they form plaques that degrade neural function resulting in diseases such as Alzheimer's if protective mechanisms aren't in place. But there were no chaperone proteins and protective mechanisms in the early Earth scenario. In spite of these impediments, scientists propose toxic beta-amyloids as one of the first steps in the formation of life.
 
The specificity of proteins is further illustrated in sickle cell anemia. In this disease, only two of the 574 amino acids in the blood's oxygen-carrying hemoglobin molecule are wrong. Each red blood cell contains about 280 million molecules of hemoglobin. This defect causes them to distort and even rupture. Death can result.
 
There are hundreds of thousands of proteins and other sequenced molecules of specific structure and shape in every cell. Things have to be perfect for life to exist. Random chemistry is totally incapable of accounting for such perfection.
 
4. It must also be considered that amino acids could go through all the work of assembling into a chain of L-amino acids, fold in a precise three-dimensional way to have enzymatic activity, and then be scuttled if the temperature ever rises above 118° F. That's highly likely on an early Earth starting at 4000° F and then continuously pockmarked with steaming volcanoes.
 
5. Before enzymes come to an inglorious hellish end in the primordial soup, their precursors would not know how to assemble and fold without preexistent DNA. On top of that, not only do enzymes need DNA, DNA cannot form without enzymes. Both must exist at the same time in order for either to exist.
 
Nevertheless, materialists imagine enzymes and DNA developing step-by-step on their own without ever laying out the step-by-step chemistry, or proving that one could occur without the other.
 
6. Hundreds of toxic problems can occur if the components of DNA and enzymes are just mixed together, as abiogenesis proposes and as occurs in your kitchen when you cook meals. For example, the ribose in DNA is a reducing sugar that will combine with amino acids in a Maillard reaction. The resulting advanced glycation end products (AGEs) are toxic. In living organisms, they can be a factor in aging and degenerative diseases, such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, chronic kidney disease, and Alzheimer's.
 
Water Problems
 
You've probably heard that since our body fluids are similar to seawater, we must have come from the sea. But when scientists try to make the biochemicals of life in seawater, nothing happens. This is, in part, because of the Law of Mass Action.
 
In a chemical reaction, there are starting ingredients and end products. Most biochemical reactions are reversible and can go either way, toward the end products or back toward the starting materials. The direction the reaction takes depends upon the relative amounts (mass) of the materials on each side of the chemical reaction. The more ingredients, the more pressure to form products; the more products, or things like products, like water, the more back pressure to revert to ingredients.

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Many of the chemical reactions that form life's biochemicals are condensation reactions, meaning ingredients combine and form water as one of the products.

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​This is how the reaction looks if proteins were to be formed in the ocean:

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Note that water would be the predominant component in an early Earth milieu. That means, according to the Law of Mass Action, the reaction would not go to the right toward the formation of proteins, but rather, to the left toward their disassembly into the starting amino acids.
 
The only reason the reactions go to the right inside a watery living organism (70% water) is that enzymes drive the reactions to the right. But there were no enzymes back in the primordial sea because enzymes are proteins and cannot form in the sea because of the law of mass action. It's a heck of a pickle.
 
Further impeding the formation of amino acids, or their degradation if formed, would be heat, light, and oxidation. Thus, the ingredients for proteins and enzymes would be foiled before they even had a chance to try a doomed condensation reaction.
 
Lipids
 
Lipids are a class of compounds that include fats, sterols, and oils. They are important to life because virtually every biological membrane is made of a sandwich of these molecules called the bilipid membrane. They are also essential in forming hormones, and cell, tissue, and immune regulators called eicosanoids. The popular press and brochures in your doctor's office promote the outdated idea that fats and cholesterol are unhealthy. However, lipids are actually critical to life—in their unaltered natural state.

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For life to arise, lipids are necessary. But since they form via condensation reactions, they, and life, could not arise spontaneously in a watery milieu.
 
Additionally, the essential fatty acids that are so important to metabolism are highly vulnerable to oxidation (like biological rusting). Oxidizing minerals, heat, oxygen, acidity, and even light will not only render them useless but convert them to free radical and trans-fat toxins. (For a more thorough discussion of this topic see my books, Lipid Nutrition, and The Cholesterol Myth.)
 
No early Earth environment can even be conceived in which these complicated long-chain fragile lipid molecules could arise by chance, remain biologically promising, and nontoxic. There would have been photo-oxidizing sunlight back then and lots of oxidizing minerals. At some point, there was oxidizing oxygen, electrical discharges, and heat cooking things up. Such a noxious cauldron would never do for either forming or protecting essential fatty acids so they could evolve.

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DNA
 
DNA and RNA hold the promise of replication, which is fundamental to life.
 
However, aside from the toxic glycation mentioned above, the ribose sugars (Deoxyribose, the D part of DNA) that form the backbone of DNA are of only one enantiomer, in this case, the right- handed (D-, dextro) variety. But when these sugars form outside of living tissue, they are a 50:50 mixture of D- and L- forms.
 
What's more, the mass action of water gets in the way of DNA synthesis driving the condensation reactions to the left, back toward the simpler ingredients. On top of that, remember that the ribose sugars cannot form if amino acids are present. But amino acids need to be present because they form enzymes, and enzymes are necessary to join the subunits (nucleotides) of DNA.
 
By far, the biggest abiogenic problem with DNA is its prodigious information. Information cannot arise without the input of intelligence.
 
This doesn't take into account the fact that functional DNA is not a bare molecule in cells. The new science of epigenetics demonstrates that proteins and other complex biochemicals shroud the helix and serve as switches to turn sections of the molecule on and off. All of the above chemical and probability impossibilities would apply to the origin of these critical shrouding epigenetic molecules.

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Dead Ends
 
Any progression of chemicals to more complex states would require incremental steps. But an event such as the formation of an amino acid has no memory; it's dead-ended. It doesn't know to hold its form until the next improbable event occurs to build it up to a more complex next step.
 
The spontaneous formation of life would require the piling on of millions of functional complexities, step by step, all remembered, held, and improved upon. Such progressive functional complexity occurs nowhere in our reality, other than within already formed living organisms.
 
There are no footholds upon which one event can advance to the next, just forbidding chemical and probability laws, and a slippery thermodynamic slope where everything slides back to where it began, or less.
 
The laws of chemistry deny the spontaneous formation of life and affirm intelligent intervention.
 
This conclusion doesn't require any religious predisposition. We are simply letting known truths guide us.

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