When NASA announced the discovery of seven Earth-like planets just 39 light-years away, one astronomy professor added: “TRAPPIST-1’s lifespan is expected to reach ten trillion years. That is a long enough time for life to evolve.” For us — who live, at most, around a hundred years — ten trillion is genuinely long. But is it long enough for life to arise on its own? That’s an entirely different question.

01Will shaking the box build a smartphone?

In 1953, Stanley Miller filled a glass tube with methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapour and ran an electric current through it. Amino acids appeared. The result spread fast, and many people walked away from church, persuaded that life — like everything else — could simply assemble itself.

Two things happened afterward, though. First, geologists realised the early Earth’s atmosphere wasn’t what Miller had assumed. Second — and this is the bigger point — making amino acids and making life are not the same thing at all.

So what would the odds actually be of amino acids coming together to form a living organism? Let’s walk through it step by step.

02The odds of just one protein

Life requires proteins. An average protein is built from 300 to 400 amino acids — but they can’t just be strung together randomly. The sequence has to be just right for the protein to fold into something functional.

Molecular biologist Douglas Axe calculated the probability that a 150-amino-acid sequence would fold into a working protein at 1 in 10⁷⁷. And that’s not the end of it. Every amino acid has to be joined by a peptide bond (about a 50% chance per bond) and every one has to be the L-form rather than the D-form (also 50%). Multiply it all together:

And that’s just one protein — not a living organism. Even ten trillion years is not enough time for one protein to form by chance. To produce a single protein within that span, roughly 10¹⁴⁷ attempts would have to occur every second.

03But one protein isn’t enough

In 2016, J. Craig Venter’s team unveiled the simplest possible synthetic cell, Syn 3.0. It contains 473 genes. The team had originally expected that 256 genes would be enough — but after decades of work, they couldn’t reduce the count below 473.

Even more striking: roughly 150 of those genes are essential for survival, but no one yet knows what they do.

Venter himself put it like this:

We have shown how complex even the simplest life forms are. And these discoveries have humbled us.

The probability of all 473 proteins forming together by chance works out to roughly 1 in 10^78,991. That is a number that simply cannot occur within the entire history of the universe.

04The atheists who changed their minds

The math has been startling enough that several prominent thinkers — having done the calculations themselves — moved from atheism toward belief in a Creator.

05What do evolutionists actually say?

The honest ones admit they don’t know. Even Richard Dawkins has said in an interview, “Nobody knows how the first living matter came into existence.” But they refuse to acknowledge a Creator on the grounds of the “God of the gaps” objection — that not knowing isn’t a license to invoke God.

Some have gone further and proposed an infinite multiverse: if there are unlimited universes, then any improbable event must occur somewhere. The trouble is — we have never observed a multiverse, and we cannot. They are treating it as fact in order to rescue chance.

The evolutionary biologist Michael Ruse put it more bluntly than most. After conceding that the origin of life is “desperately difficult,” he closed a debate with these words:

I would rather be a fool than surrender to the Bible.

There it is. The real motive on the table. They are not searching for truth — they simply do not want to surrender before God.

To look with one’s own eyes at how intricately even the simplest life is designed — and then to deny the obvious conclusion of that observation — is, the Bible says, the work of those who “professed to be wise” and “became fools.”

The complexity that science keeps unveiling, the more it advances, points clearly to one conclusion. The God who made this world is alive. He made everything for us — and He made us.