The snowflake

Supposing for a moment that you are someone who has never seen a snowflake up close and knows nothing about what snow is or how it forms.

You are shown a microscope slide of a snowflake. You immediately notice that it is radially symmetrical, geometrically intricate, and upon viewing other examples, that no two are alike.

To you, this is obvious proof of some sort of intelligent unseen artist, sculpting each snowflake as it falls to Earth. How could something so complex and beautiful just happen by itself?

However, the snowflake's hexagonal radial symmetry is a macro scale expression of the hexagonal bond formed by water atoms when they crystallize at sufficiently low temperatures. Each water molecule is comprised of three parts; one hydrogen, two oxygen. When a bunch of them undergo covalent bonding at low temps, you get a hexagonal lattice, like chickenwire but three dimensional. This is why the larger snowflake is hexagonally configured.

The fractal layout is a typical result of natural processes acting on matter in such a way as to accumulate complexity against some sort of resistance. These patterns also appear under other circumstances but are always a dead giveaway that the object in which they appear is procedural in origin.

No two are alike because snowflakes fall through fleeting pockets of colder and warmer air as they descend, which accelerates and slows down the freezing process, respectively. The temperature fluctuation each snowflake experiences as it falls to earth is unique, hence the resulting snowflake is unique.

"Ah, but God made the atoms/natural processes/etc." is the same error in reasoning carried up a level.

But, how does the structure of a snowflake teach us anything about the origins of living things? The key is their fractal structure. Fractals appear all over the place in nature. So do fibonnaci spirals, for related reasons. Wherever an optimizing process like evolution selected for efficiency of electrical or fluid distribution, for example, the result will always be fractal. Your central nervous system, your veins and arteries, your lungs, trees, ferns, the veins on leaves and so on. Fibonnaci spirals appear in living things where efficiency of growth was selected for (snail shells, your cochlea, pinecones, pineapples, the head of a sunflower, aloe plants, etc.) and in nonliving things shaped by rotation (hurricanes, spiral galaxies, tornados, etc.)

This is indeed a type of design, but design performed by a simple optimizing process, not an intelligent being. Intelligently engineered objects like microchips, cars, airplanes and so on are also very complex, but it's a distinctly different type of complexity. Once you know what to look for, you can tell the two apart very easily, even if it's something you've never encountered before.

The end result of optimizing processes, which are themselves exceedingly simple, can nonetheless be mind bogglingly complicated if the process has been working on it for a very, very long time. Start with anything that can make copies of itself with occasional errors, apply selective pressure, and in a billion years or so you'll have critters of some sort. Possibly ones capable of understanding how they got to be so complex.

"Ah, but how can you get something capable of self-copying without an intelligent designer? That's like putting the pieces of a watch in a bag, shaking it up and getting a completed watch!" Or the "tornado in a junkyard" thought experiment, both staples of creationist apologetics.

The people who say this usually have never heard of prebiotic evolution, so when they say "watch", they have the completed animal cell in mind. Each cell in your body is indeed astonishingly complicated and I fully agree it would be absurd to suggest that one of them spontaneously formed. But, that isn't what happened and it's a misrepresentation of abiogenesis.

Life did not begin with cells. Or even with DNA. It began with the simplest possible chemical reaction that churns out copies of itself. These can be very simple indeed to the point where it's entirely plausible for one to self-assemble by chance under the right conditions, as the snowflake does.

Once you have something, however rudimentary, which can self copy with occasional errors and selective pressures to cull useless or detrimental mutations, evolution can happen. But, this is still just a precursor to RNA. Where does the rest of the cell come from?

As it turns out, the bi-lipid membranes of animal cells can be shown to form spontaneously in any lipid-rich solution that you saturate with gas bubbles; Because lipids are hydrophilic on one end and hydrophobic on the other they self-orient in an organized film on the surface of the bubble.

When the gas escapes (because pressure changes and it dissolves back out) the lipid shell remains. It's easy to see how a prebiotic ancestor of DNA could become trapped in such a bi-lipid membrane and gain a reproductive advantage from that protection.

Mitochondria are another element of modern cells that we know the origin of. They're single celled organisms themselves, with their own DNA. They used to be an independent organism that at some point became a symbiotic part of the little ecosystem inside animal cells.

Far from a "tornado in a junkyard" or "pieces of watch in a bag" concept where they have to magically assemble every molecule into a complete cell, it's more like a series of easy accidental steps where each builds on the last, like a thief guessing one digit of a combination lock at a time and hearing a click that confirms he can move onto the next as opposed to guessing all of the digits in one try.

The "click" in this case was the fact that each modification made the precursors to modern cells slightly more durable and successful at making copies, giving them enough of an advantage over the rest of the population to completely replace it over time. The rare cases where this occurred, where the modification was beneficial instead of detrimental, were "locked in" because it increased the reproductive success of that replicator to where it could out-compete replicators without that mutation as well as ones with mutations that hindered them, until it became the new normal.

Each time this happened, the descendants of the replicator with the beneficial mutation would gradually replace the rest by attrition until it was the norm. This is just evolution by natural selection on the scale of microorganisms, we directly observe this all the time in the lab because they live, reproduce and die rapidly enough that for them evolution is rapid enough for human beings to witness in the span of a few months or years instead of millions.

All I am telling you that's news to your ears, if I've gauged your level of understanding correctly, is that this rapid process of natural selection also acts on chemical replicators much simpler than DNA or even RNA, which are far from being what science defines as life. So in fact you don't need the spontaneous formation of DNA to get life from non-life. You just need any chemical reaction that makes copies of itself, plus natural selection, plus time.

You also mentioned the sun and the moon as examples you believe allow no possible explanation other than a deliberately engineered universe. If you're referring to their shape, gravity causes mass to assume a more or less spherical form over time. Gravity also accounts for said masses settling into stable orbits.

The universe can appear very hospitable to life, if you live on Earth. In the same way that the world appears to be a luxurious playground if you live in a gated wealthy community. The universe is on the whole 99.99999999999999999999999999% immediately lethal to us due to extremes of temperature, pressure and radiation. It looks very much like the debris from an explosion, congealed by gravity into spheroids, orbiting the embers of that blast. Not a massive habitat designed with biological organisms in mind.

To look at the Earth itself and think "wow, everything is designed for us! We can breathe the air, the temperature is just right, etc. etc. etc." is backwards reasoning. We fit the Earth because evolution adapted us to it, the Earth was not designed for us. Douglas Adams has this wonderful short story about a puddle of water marveling at how perfectly the hole it's in fits its every contour. It reasons that the hole must've been made for it, when of course it's the water which conforms to the shape of the hole.