The priest is Father Jose Maniyangat of St. Mary’s Church in Macclenny and he says the event occurred on April 14, 1985 — Divine Mercy Sunday — when he was still in his homeland of India. We present it for your discernment.

Now 54 and ordained in 1975, Father Maniyangat recalls that he was on his way to celebrate Mass at a mission when the motorcycle he was riding — the common means of transport there — was hit by a jeep driven by a man who was intoxicated.

Father Maniyangat, who came to America in 1986 — first to Idaho, then Florida — told Spirit Daily that he was rushed to a hospital 35 miles away — and that on the way, “my soul came out from the body.”

“Immediately I saw my guardian angel,” he relates. “I also saw my body and the people who were carrying me to the hospital. They were crying, and immediately the angel told me, ‘I’m going to take you to Heaven. The Lord wants to meet you.’ He said that on the way he wanted to show me hell and purgatory.”

That, asserts Father Maniyangat, was when hell, an awful sight, opened before him. It was daunting. “I saw Satan and people fighting, tortured, and screaming,” claims the cleric. “And the fire too. I saw fire. I saw people suffering and the angel told me it was due to mortal sin and the fact that they were not repentant. That was the thing. Unrepentant.”

The priest says he was told there are seven “degrees” or levels of suffering in the netherworld. Those who committed “mortal sin after mortal sin” in life were suffering the most intense heat. “They had bodies and looked very ugly, so cruel and ugly, horrifying,” says Father Maniyangat. “They were human but like monsters: fearful, ugly-looking things. I saw people I knew but I can’t say who they were. The angel told me I could not reveal this.”

The sins that got them into that state, he says, were transgressions such as abortion, homosexuality, hatefulness, and sacrilege. If they had repented, they would have gone to purgatory — the angel allegedly told him. He was surprised at who he saw in hell. Some were priests. Some were bishops. “There were many, because they had misled the people,” he asserts — again, for your discernment. “They were people I never expected.”

After that, purgatory allegedly opened before him. There are also seven levels there, he says, and fire, but it is far less intense than hell and there was “no quarreling or fighting.” The main suffering is that they can’t see God. He says that souls in purgatory may have committed numerous mortal sins but had made it there by virtue of simple repentance — and now have the joy of knowing that one day they will be in Heaven. “I had a chance to communicate with the souls,” says Father Maniyangat — who by all first impressions is pious and holy. “They asked me to pray for them and ask the people to pray for them also.”

His angel, he says, was “very beautiful and bright and white,” difficult to put into words, and took Father Maniyangat to Heaven. That was when a tunnel — as experienced in so many near-death accounts — materialized.

“Heaven opened and I heard the music, the angels singing and praising God,” he says. “Beautiful music. I never heard music like that in this world. I saw God face to Face, and Jesus and Mary, so bright and illuminating. Jesus told me, ‘I need you. I want you to go back. In your second life you will be an instrument of healing to My people, and you will walk in a foreign land and speak a foreign tongue.’”

Within a year, Father Maniyangat found himself in a far-off land called the United States.

The priest says the Lord was far more beautiful than any image can convey. His Face resembled the Sacred Heart, but was far more luminous, says Father Maniyangat, who describes it as like “a thousand suns.” The Blessed Mother was next to Jesus. Once more, earthly representations of her, he emphasizes, are “just a shadow.” The priest says she told him simply to do whatever her Son said.

Heaven, he says, has a beauty, peace, and happiness that are “a million times” more than anything we know on earth.

“I saw priests and bishops also there,” he notes. “The clouds were different — not dark or cloudy, but shining. Very beautiful. Very bright. And there were rivers that were different than you see here. This is our real home. I never experienced in my life that kind of peace and joy.”

He says the Blessed Mother and his angel still appear to him. She comes every first Saturday during his morning meditation. “It is personal, to guide me in my ministry,” says the pastor, whose church is thirty miles from downtown Jacksonville. “The apparitions are private, not public. Her face is the same, but one day she appears with the Child, one day as Our Lady of Grace, or Our Lady of Sorrows. Different times she appears different ways. She told me the world is full of sin and asked me to fast and pray and offer Mass for the world, so that God will not punish it. We need more prayer. She is concerned about the future of the world because of abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia. She said if people don’t come back to God, there will be chastisement.”

The main message, however, is hope: like so many others, Father Maniyangat saw the afterlife as filled with a healing Light, and brought some of that light back with him. Afterward he started a healing ministry and says he has seen people cured of everything from cancer to asthma. He also conducts generational healing services, in which darkness is allegedly erased from ancestry.

Has the devil attacked? Yes, especially before services. He has been harassed. He has been physically assaulted. But it is nothing, he says, compared to the grace.

Cancer, AIDS, heart problems, arterial blockages. People are slain in the spirit around him. It is when they come to that they feel the peace and at times report healings that serve as a taste of what he saw and felt in Heaven.

July 2004

The story itself is powerful.  One passage especially caught my attention:

“The clouds were different — not dark or cloudy, but shining. Very beautiful. Very bright. And there were rivers that were different than you see here. This is our real home. I never experienced in my life that kind of peace and joy.”

On the very same day that I chanced on this, I found the following by Msgr. Ronad Knox, in his book, Heaven and Charing Cross.  He describes it well.  The world we live in gives only a glimpse – a pale image of reality.  This is the atheist delusion — the idea that what we see and sense here  alone is the fullness of reality.  That’s the irrationality of scientism.  Our reasoning powers, supposedly, were created from the unintelligent matter of the universe, and yet we are capable of seeing trillions, perhaps an infinite number of rational connections all indicating meaning and purpose.  Meanwhile, the glimpses that indicate that there is something more beyond this world, are taken to be the only reality that does or can exist.

THERE is a curious point about our Lord’s teaching, or at any rate about that more intimate, more characteristic teaching preserved for us in the Gospel of St John, which we sometimes fail to notice because we are so accustomed, nowadays, to the use of metaphor in common speech. I mean this point—that our Lord does not simply compare heavenly things with earthly by way of illustration, does not simply say, for example, ” You see that Vine ? Well, that Vine will give you some idea of the unity of the Church.” Rather, he treats all the earthly things with which we are familiar in this world of sense as if they were mere shadows, mere inferior copies of the reality which awaits us in heaven. He starts, if we may say so, at the other end ; not at the earthly end which is more familiar to us ordinary human beings, but at the heavenly end which is more familiar to the Incarnate Son of God.
So it is when he talks to the Samaritan woman ; “if thou didst know the gift of God, and who he is that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou perhaps wouldst have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.” By ” living water ” he does not mean fresh water or running water, as the woman supposes. He means that all the water you can find in this world of sense, the purest, the freshest to be had anywhere, is only dead water ; the real water, the real living water, is something which does not belong to the world of sense at all. We shall never know what water really means until we have the direct experience of that reality of grace of which water is only a pale image. So with the Vine ; the vines you may see growing on some hill-side in France are not real vines, he tells us, they are only a sort of imitation. We shall never understand the mystery of organic growth, of that principle in nature whereby a tree or a plant goes on producing fresh shoots according to its kind, until we know, as not even the Saints can know it on earth, the nature of that bond which unites all Christian people with their Divine Head, and through him with one another.
And so it is, he tells us, with the very bread we eat ; the simplest, most primitive fact of human life—so much so that the old poets used to describe the human race as ” men that live by bread.” The true bread, the living bread, is not the common bread which we eat. The common bread which we eat is only a sham, a copy, an image of that true bread which came down from heaven. And if we ask what is the true bread which came down from heaven, he has given us the answer : “I am the living bread ; the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world ; he that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life.” You see, we are so materialistic, our minds are so chained to the things of sense, that we imagine our Lord as instituting the Blessed Sacrament with bread and wine as the remote matter of it because bread and wine reminded him of that grace which he intended the Blessed Sacrament to bestow. But, if you come to think of it, it was just the other way about. When he created the worlds he gave common bread and wine for our use in order that we might understand what the Blessed Sacrament was when it came to be instituted. He did not design the Sacred Host to be something like bread. He designed bread to be something like the Sacred Host.
Always, it is the things which affect us outwardly and impress themselves on our senses that are the shams, the imaginaries ; reality belongs to the things of the spirit. All the din and clatter of the streets, all the great factories which dominate our landscape, are only echoes and shadows if you think of them for a moment in the light of eternity ; the Reality is in here, is there above the altar, is that part of it which our eyes cannot see and our senses cannot distinguish. The motto on Cardinal Newman’s tomb ought to be the funeral motto of every Catholic, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, Out of shadows and appearances into the truth. When death brings us into another world, the experience will not be that of one who falls asleep and dreams, but that of one who wakes from a dream into the full light of day. Here, we are so surrounded by the things of sense that we take them for the full reality. Only sometimes we have a glimpse which corrects that wrong perspective. And above all, when we see the Blessed Sacrament enthroned, we should look up towards that white Disc which shines in the monstrance as towards a chink through which, just for a moment, the light of the other world shines through.
There are periods, there are moments in history, which seem to men living at the time to shew up the world for the transient, fleeting thing it is. Wars or famines or pestilence have depopulated countries, and have left the survivors uncertain of their prospects, uncertain of life itself; the energies of human nature seem to have used themselves up, and it feels as if the forces of inanimate nature, too, were threatened with dissolution. At such times, men have often turned to their religion with more ardour, have separated themselves from the world and gone to live as hermits or in the cloister, reminded at last that we have here no abiding city. You will catch the echoes of that feeling in the sermons of St Gregory at the end of the sixth century, in the rhythm of Bernard of Morlaix at the end of the twelfth. It is not an illusion people get at such times that the world is transitory. Rather at such times they lose the illusion that the world is permanent. They realize more than at other times what is true at all times, that the whole of this visible creation is but a thin plank between us and eternity.

For the believer (and I’ll use my own Catholic belief, although almost all theistic views will work):  “We have been created to worship God – and to live with Him in happiness for all eternity”.

For the atheist:  “We were not created.  We emerged from nature as an accident – we have no ultimate meaning or purpose, and there is no ultimate goal.  There is no afterlife.  Biological death is the end of each individual person.”

To live with God for all eternity is a goal with immense impact for each believer.  Obviously, it’s a fulfillment of infinite duration.  The believer will contemplate the infinite beauty, majesty and perfection of God — to live within the fullness of God’s love forever.  This is the completion of one’s being and the fulfillment of the hope for happiness that one finds on earth.

The truths that we find living in our lifespan on earth are the beginning of what will be the perfect bliss for eternity.

As for purpose, we can see it in Christ’s words on the Cross:  “It is finished”.  He shows what it means to accomplish a mission – to complete a work that has an abundance of meaning and impact on all of humanity.

The mystery is how the purposeless of atheism could capture anyone’s commitment.  One cannot even find a reason to string words together to explain it — it’s as shallow and empty a thing as the human mind can imagine.   And yet some do embrace that worldview and that should continue to be a cause of amazement to those who treasure the gifts of rationality and insight that mark the human experience.

We moved from assuming we know, to recognizing that not only don’t we understand the principles, we have no conception of why they might be.

For something like the understanding of the human mind — there  is too much going on in the simplest intellectual task … there is a blizzard of electrical activity.

There is no longer the expectation that the accumulation of yet more facts will ever provide an adequate scientific explanation of human experience.

Every human being lives through purposeful acts — making choices and decisions oriented to goals, and always seeking meaning.  If evolutionary theory is true, however, there is no real purpose or meaning to be found.  Many evolutionists state this fact clearly.

This would be like having beings who live in a world entirely in darkness — where light does not exist — explain that light does not exist. 

Genetic information does not yeild function in proportion to size:

25,000 genes in human
7,000 genes in bacteria
17,000 genes in millimeter sized worm
15,000 genes in fruitfly

I may know everything about your brain, but nothing about your mind.

Advances in human knowledge – open the door to further seemingly unanswerable questions.   Evolutionary gaps are never filled — instead, discoveries often open up more problems and wider gaps.

Two modes of reality seen in water
a. Snowflakes
b. Chemical H2O
Science is claimes as the ‘only begetter of truth’ – science is believed to be more valuable than the humanities.
Standing upright is a bizarre thing to do.  Requires dramatic and wholesale redesign.
There is no evidence of the benefits for greater human intelligence. 
A very big price was paid for larger head size – 25% more food was needed.  Much greater difficulty in giving birth – birth canal had to change size.
47 As brain size increased, it would have been insurmountable without the extraordinary “solution” of slowing fetal brain growth in womb and then accelerating it afterwards.
There is nothing in the human/chimp genome to show how or why …

Tattersall – humans are “qualitatively distinct”, not simply an improved version

Modern day lack of astonishment.  Science does not capture the beauty and connectedness of it all.  ‘the sublime spirit that rolls through all things’.
Why are things so ordered?  There should be chaos and disorder.

Claim: There is nothing that natural selection does not explain … there can be no more ambitious theory
Newton – proportional causes have proportional effect.  Darwin – same cause has grossly disprortionate effects.  Far too simple to account for complexity.
Cuvier – no part can change without the whole changing
“scrutinizing every variation … rejecting what is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good …”
The eye emerged independently 40 times in different forms

 The heart, a masterpiece of engineering efficiency
 … when purposive efforts of brilliant bioengineering employing the most modern technology fall so far shore of nature’s model, it seems merely perverse to suggest an undirected process of nature … could give rise to this masterpiece of design.
unsolved problem of homology

Knockouts – genes are multitasked.  Gene for eyes found in blind worms.   Genes act in unison.

Japanese quake’s epicenter located near Marian apparition site

The epicenter of the earthquake that caused a deadly March 11 tsunami is located near the site of an apparition in which Mary warned about a worldwide disaster that could afflict humanity.

Japanese church officials have confirmed that the Diocese of Sendai, in the north of the country, was hit hardest by the 8.8 magnitude earthquake – the worst in Japanese history – and the resulting 23-foot waves.

Hundreds of people have already been confirmed dead in the city of Sendai, located less than 90 miles away from the apparition site of Our Lady of Akita in the town of Yuzawa.

The city of Akita, which experienced fire damage and flooding along with many parts of northern Japan, is a place of veneration for Catholics.

In 1973, the Virgin Mary was said to have predicted a number of future events – including natural disasters even more serious than Friday’s earthquake and tsunami – during three appearances to a Japanese religious sister, Sr. Agnes Sasagawa.

The purported appearances of the Virgin Mary in Japan were reviewed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1988. During his time as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith prior to his election as Pope Benedict XVI, he let stand the local bishop’s judgment that the apparitions and the messages were acceptable for the faithful.

The messages warned of chaos within the Church, and disasters which could afflict the world.

“If men do not repent and better themselves, God the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity,” Mary reportedly told Sr. Agnes. “It will be a punishment greater than the (biblical) flood, such as never seen before.”

“Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful,” she said. “The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church, in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops.”

“Churches and altars will be sacked. The Church will be full of those who accept compromises, and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.”

“Each day, recite the prayers of the Rosary,” she told Sr. Agnes. “With the Rosary, pray for the Pope, the bishops and priests.”

Two years after the last message, the statue of the Virgin Mary in the chapel where the apparitions had occurred began to emit tears and drops of blood. The occurrence continued for more than six years.

This warning from heaven follows a pattern which should be familiar to all — but most people, including many Catholics do not know or take interest in the messages that God is communicating to mankind.

One could look, for example, at this book entitled:

If Only We had Listened

The title says a lot.

Twelve years before Rwanda was devastated by genocide, the Virgin Mary came to Kibeho with a clear warning: “My children, it does not have to happen if people would listen and come back to God.”

The visionaries who experienced the Kibeho apparitions, which have since been approved by the Vatican, reported that Mary showed them horrifying prophetic scenes including a river of blood, people brutally killing each other, and abandoned corpses with no one to bury them.

The Rwandan people did not listen to Mary’s motherly guidance and were unable to escape the tragic consequences; when the terrifying scenes shown to the visionaries became reality, it was simply too late. In her newest book, If Only We Had Listened, best-selling author and genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza presents many of the profound messages that were given by Our Lady in Kibeho—messages that could have prevented the tragedies in her homeland, and which, to this day, should serve as a warning for the whole world. Illustrated with color pictures.

If only we had listened to God’s messenger at Akita also.  But we really didn’t and now the whole world could suffer from the effects.

One might look at Our Lady of Fatima’s prophecy about the horrors of World Wars one and two — and how those prophecies came to pass in a dreadfully accurate way.

The messages are intended for all — very especially for the non-believers, the scoffers and those who ridicule God.

The standing dogma of eye evolution is refuted with the discovery of an invertebrate that sees light like vertebrates do, rather than like their more closely related cousins, according to a study published today (March 1) in EvoDevo.

With the new finding rendering Darwinian theory more confused and incoherent than ever, the article concludes:

Now it’s unclear which photoreceptor originally gave animals sight, and which kind evolved to sense light later. Or, perhaps an ancestor used both receptors to see, and over the millennia, one variety or the other lost its visual function.

Once again, the evolutionary fairy-tale plays itself out in public statements that are simply embraced as part of our cultural mythology — that is, until new findings show the myth to be false, and thus cause the storytelling to twist itself around again.

In this case, there was some supposed need for organisms to possess the immensely sophisticated an innovative power of sight — a power with precision and capacity that is a “natural miracle” in itself.

But then we hear it claimed also that it’s possible that evolution, which created this power from nothing — also caused it to be lost (because the organism no longer had the need for sight).  So, there was a survival advantage to being completely blind, apparently.

Despite its modern appearances, this loon-like bird swam the lakes of China 110 million years ago and appears to be an important ancestor of all modern birds.
    Dixie State College paleontologist Jerry Harris joined an international team of scientists to describe this new species of bird that appears to be the most ancient nearly-modern bird yet unearthed. A report on the aquatic bird – known as Gansus yumenensis – found in northwestern China appears in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
    “The fossils we’re finding there have completely blown us away,” said Harris, an author of the paper.
    Hailu You, lead study author from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing, said this small waterfowl appears to be close to the oldest modern birds.
    “It’s very like a modern bird,” You said of the creature’s appearance.
    Harris said researchers have found, among other fossils, a bird foot with webbing still attached, which indicates it likely lived on or near water. Other bone structures suggest it was capable of diving to pursue whatever meals may have been swimming nearby.
    Though the fossils have stayed in China, Harris and Matt Lamanna, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, studied casts of the fossils and also went overseas to confirm their findings with the real fossils.
    “We’re learning about the origins of the modern bird group,” said Lamanna.

The life cycle of the monarch butterfly teaches that in the seemingly inert egg are all of the genetic instructions to form a sixteen-legged caterpillar and a six-legged butterfly. There was no physical manifestation of the caterpillar when it was an egg just as there was no physical manifestation of the butterfly when it was a caterpillar. There was a manifested morphology
while there were unmanifested in the organism’s genetic reserves meticulously planned transitional structures and different morphologies. To observe such remarkable transformations in 60 days teaches an important lesson on genetic reserves. These incredibly complex transformations, which no human engineer can blueprint, may be called sequential genetic
reserves. They occur once in a rigorous order to attain adulthood and do not occur again. Every complex organism has them. Some do not transform from sixteen legs to six legs, some do not transform from pedestrians to flyers, but the transformations to adulthood are no less remarkable.
Every multicelled life form must grow and develop from an egg or seed to an adult configuration and that requires continuous structural and functional alterations that are molecularly planned, organized, coordinated, controlled, and commanded beyond human comprehension. We do not
know how the DNA did it, but we do know that such megengineering could not have been done brainlessly the way evolution pretends.
–Joseph Mastropaolo
http://www.csulb.edu/~jmastrop/data1.html

Research using entomological radar has found that migratory insects such as butterflies and moths perform their own flight planning in order to optimize their flights across continents. They select the right time to ride the wind, and they determine the right altitude and flight heading to reach their destination (rather than where the wind is going). As one of the researchers explained:

Migratory butterflies and moths have evolved an amazing capacity to use favourable tailwinds. By flying at the heights where the wind currents are fastest, migratory moths can travel between their summer and winter grounds in just a few nights.

And what is the evidence that this amazing capacity evolved? What mutations produced it? And how did evolution create the ability of the insects know when to start their journey and where they should go?
– Dr. Cornelius Hunter
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2010/11/insects-compute-optimal-flight-plans.html

Watch the Amazing Butterfly Life Cycle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez0H7VJMWYs

Butterfly fossil from 130 million years ago – virtually identical to modern butterflies:

The metamorphosis of the butterfly has no evolutionary explanation.

Chaos Theory of Evolution

“there is still huge debate about the role of natural selection and adaptation in ‘macroevolution’ – big evolutionary events such as changes in biodiversity over time, evolutionary radiations and, of course, the origin of species …

The overall picture is that the main response to major environmental changes is individualistic movement and changes in abundance, rather than extinction or speciation. In other words, the connection between environmental change and evolutionary change is weak, which is not what might have been expected from Darwin’s hypothesis.

Macroevolution is not the simple accumulation of microevolutionary changes but has its own processes and patterns.  There can be no “laws” of evolution.  We may be able to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the evolution of any given species or group after the fact, but we will not be able to generalise from these to other sequences of events.  From a practical point of view, this means we will be unable to predict how species will respond to projected climate changes over next century.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827821.000-the-chaos-theory-of-evolution.html?full=true

Robert Shapiro:

In the interim, looking for topics to get amused with, I got into the question of the origin of life, and knowing the DNA chemistry that I did know — and helped write — I looked at the papers published on the origin of life and decided that it
was absurd that the thought of nature of its own volition putting together a DNA or an RNA molecule was unbelievable.

I’m always running out of metaphors to try and explain what the difficulty is. But suppose you took Scrabble sets, or any word game sets, blocks with letters, containing every language on Earth, and you heap them together and you then took a scoop and you scooped into that heap, and you flung it out on the lawn there, and the letters fell into a line which contained the words “To be or not to be, that is the question,” that is roughly the odds of an RNA molecule, given no feedback — and there would be no feedback, because it wouldn’t be functional until it attained a certain length and could copy itself — appearing on the Earth.
Christian de Duve, the Nobel laureate, once wrote a letter to Nature which was headed, ‘Did God Make RNA?’ Because it’s hard to think of any other manner in which RNA out of purely abiotic chemistry would assemble itself on the early Earth. Seeing this area called prebiotic chemistry, I decided, my major attention still being funded by National Cancer Institute, and devoted to how chemicals can rip apart DNA as a hobby essentially, I started publishing papers which disassembled — deconstructed, if our German friend wants — so-called prebiotic chemistry, and showed that in every case the result was due to the flagrant interference of the investigator in biasing the results to attain the results that he wanted.

So, shifting the focus to the spontaneous creation of RNA molecules doesn’t help much. And Mr. Shapiro’s “scrabble” analogy certainly looks he is talking about a language.

These same researchers are a little worried that the difficulties they face in explaining the origin of the 53 protein/ 3 plyneculeotide structure of the ribosome will lead some to conclude that it is irreducibly complex, and thus give support to “people who do intelligent design”.

VENTER: But using these tools, it’s my hope we can do something similar to what you suggest. We can extrapolate back once we have the database of Planet Earth genes to what might have been a precursor species, and then we should be able to build that in the lab and see if it was really viable, and then start to do component mixtures to see if you can spontaneously generate such things.
CHURCH: But isn’t it the case that, if we take all the life forms we have so far, isn’t the minimum for the ribosome about 53 proteins and 3 polynucleotides? And hasn’t that kind of already reached a plateau where adding more genomes doesn’t reduce that number of proteins?
VENTER: Below ribosomes, yes: you certainly can’t get below that. But you have to have self-replication.
CHURCH: But that’s what we need to do — otherwise they’ll call it irreducible
complexity. If you say you can’t get below a ribosome, we’re in trouble, right? We have to find a ribosome that can do its trick with less than 53 proteins.
VENTER: In the RNA world, you didn’t need ribosomes.
CHURCH: But we need to construct that. Nobody has constructed a ribosome that works well without proteins.
VENTER: Yes.
SHAPIRO: I can only suggest that a ribosome forming spontaneously has about the same probability as an eye forming spontaneously.
CHURCH: It won’t form spontaneously; we’ll do it bit by bit.
SHAPIRO: Both are obviously products of long evolution of preexisting life through the process of trial and error.
CHURCH: But none of us has recreated that any.
SHAPIRO: There must have been much more primitive ways of putting together catalysts.
CHURCH: But prove it.
…
LLOYD: I would be a little bit worried. If I look at Freeman’s two steps that precede formation of ribosomes, ribosome is step three, with collaboration and intervention of the ribosome and you have these two steps prior to that. Before is the parasitic stage and use of ATP, and then prior to that just the kind of garbage bags on their own. There could have been a lot of events of natural selection going on to get to the stage — it could be a very very very long process, with Avogadro’s number of events. There are not enough graduate student lifetimes in the world, even with lots of private money invested in it to actually try to explore all those. Even if life just happened here on Earth, it is something that happened globally, and it went on for quite a long time. I’m saying this is a positive sense — the fact that you can’t do this in the lab,  even though people who do intelligent design will say, ‘ah ha, see, irreducible complexity’ — it might in fact be that it was very complex in the sense of requiring a long and complicated process or computation to arrive at.

http://www.edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf

“No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organism with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms’ genomes programmed?”

Three subsets of sequence complexity and their relevance to
biopolymeric information
David L Abel1 and Jack T Trevors
http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1742-4682-2-29.pdf