Hi EndofMysteries,
You already have several replies, so some of what I will say will be a repeat of what is already posted -- please excuse that. Like many former Witnesses who are now atheists I wondered about exactly the same things. My conclusion for many years -- Jehovah was indeed the "Grand Creator" (Ecclesiastes 12:1).
"EVERY lifeform on Earth, humans, plants, bacteria, cells, ANYTHING with life originated with other life."
This is a very important point! And at least for examples of living things today it argues against God being the direct creator. I mean in the here and now. If you saw a puppy or a blade of grass it would be silly to suggest God created that specific instance of that living thing. We know enough about life on earth to know...
"All trees come from living seeds from other trees, etc. There is no life that comes from nothing, even simple cells."
Exactly! Life today comes from parent forms of that life, which as I say, happens outside of any supernatural intervention. But we know even more than this simple fact. By looking deeper at life, we can see it is all related. Exact sequences of DNA in the cell of a banana can be found in human cells. In fact the closeness of such relationships is why we can eat bananas and get food energy from them.
"So God forming these things then putting his life force into it, him being the originator of life for the start of these things, is the only thing that makes sense."
At this point your logic gets to an "origin of..." question that is attempting to build on your early observations about the origin of living things in the here and now. There are three interrelated origin of... questions in this area.
(1) Origin of living things in the here and now. Non-supernatural answer: From parent forms of the life. Supernatural answer: Each life form is directly created by a superbeing we would call God.
(2) Origin of species: Non-supernatural answer: Parent to child forms of life change over time and natural sorting/selective pressures can result in completely new species. However, if one had a complete record of all life ancetors on earth eventually one would get back to a LUCA (last unified common ancestor) of us all. Supernatural answer: In a process outlined in the Book of Genesis through a period of six creative days, God created specific species fully formed and ready to reproduce. Lastly he created Adam and Eve. There is of course a range of views on how involved God was, from he created only the first life form and let natural selection take over, to Genesis is literally true, even to the point the creative days were 24 hours long and happened just over 6000 years ago.
(3) Origin of first living thing: Non-supernatural answer: Earth existed without much free oyxgen and a moon much closer than it is today. Tidal action, lightening and energy from the sun, eventually resulted in chemical compounds that could replicate themselves. No controlled experiment has been able to demonstrate the exact pathway from non-living matter to the first self replicating system. So we would properly say, we don't know at this point exactly how the transition from non-living matter to the first living thing happened. Supernatural answer: God created the first living cell.
"If it was possible that life can just appear out of nothing, and all life on Earth just happened, why can't intelligent life do it?"
The non-supernatural answer is not that life appeared out of nothing. The proposed solution involves interactions between physical things, like the planet earth, basic chemistry, etc. We see all sorts of intelligent design around us, but none of it (so far) involves the creation of self-replicating life. An Ant hill is an example of something that was designed and created by the collective inteliigence of the tiny brains in all the Ants. However the Ant itself is the product of a completely naturalistic process of life making copies of itself.
"Instead of the billions of lifeforms on Earth that just happened to happen somehow, why can't we trace how they all originated and create any type of life we can imagine. Why would it still not be happening today? Why would it have stopped?"
The phrase "just happened to happen somehow" tilts towards the over-used word "chance" that often appears in the anti-evolution publications. The scientists who study life on earth and how it changes have worked out a great number of details that regulate the process of evolution. The theory of evolution is not about "chance" in the way Witnesses often portray it. There are known reasons why mating two dogs will not produce a cat. Yet at the same time, we can be fairly confident both a dog and a cat had a common ancestor in the past. Most of the tracing back in these cases involve either DNA sequencing and/or examination of fossils.
Evolution as a process has not stopped and in fact is a big concern to humans who worry about new forms of life that can arise and cause disease. But if you're asking why the earth does not produce new life like it did for the first living thing, I think that answer is twofold -- the amount of oxygen in the air would be a problem and existing life would so destroy any new, likely very fragile, life forms that spontaneously formed. In other words, you need the special conditions of the ancient earth to exist as the stage for the transition from non-living to living matter.
"Also think about this, according to the bible, man was formed out of soil. Written long before we knew the properties of soil such as copper, iron, calcium, zinc, etc. Our bodies need all of those things to survive and function properly. What happens if you are deficient in copper, iron, etc. It certainly seems like we were formed from soil and the start of life was God's lifeforce going into us."
In some respects, ideas can evolve and survive in the way life does. Thus, I think it is entirely possible the material in Genesis is like this. Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 is from one source that calls God "God" and at 2:4, you see a second source where God suddenly becomes "Jehovah." This is a sort of co-mingling of literary DNA that gets itself copied, because it appeals to the minds of humans. Thus for an ancient person who could make the connection between soil and farming it might make total sense that humans also must have come from the soil. Or in the reverse when a living thing dies and rots it could appear to be returning to the soil.
"I can understand Agnostic thinking because of distrust from anything written, but for athiests, not believing life came from a God seems even harder to make sense of since no life on Earth originates from plain dead matter. Do you have alternative explanations?"
I self identify as an atheist, although I would say, proving the non-existence of something may not be possible. I shy away from "agnostic" because for me, it doesn't seem productive to just keeping saying "I don't know" rather than take the limited bit we know and come to some conclusion until something better comes along. Untimately "life came from a God" is circular reasoning, since if you believe God is a alive, then one must answer how such a complex living thing came into existence.
God also violates the general pattern of the Universe and Life. Complexity has built up over time and often very slowly. Stars like our Sun and planets like Earth are a more recent invention of the Universe. Multi-cellular life only comes about after years and years of single-cellular life. And humans? Just 3.7 million years. So... to place the most imaginable complex thing, God, at the start, does not fit the over all plot line we can detect.
Finally the biggest problem is this: If one shoves nature asside on the assumption that the laws of nature that govern things like chemistry are insufficient to transition non-living matter into the first living thing, then we are completely lost and know nothing -- we may as well be living in the matrix. What we "know" is tied directly to how dependable those laws of nature are. If we invite a undetectable law-breaker into the universe who can act at any time for any reason, then nothing can truly be known.
Cheers,
-Randy
