Brian Miller’s thermodynamics argument for design in the origin of life

December 3, 2025

I’m doing prep work for a possible episode of the Knight and Rose Show. This time, I’ve been looking into Dr. Brian Miller’s argument about thermodynamics and the origin of life. So, the first thing I did was read his chapter in “The Mystery of Life’s Origin”, which is available online for free. Then I listened to a recent episode that he did with Dr. James Tour, on The Science & Faith Podcast.

First, here is the podcast:

I actually made a transcript of the episode using TurboScribe AI, so I could read along while I listened. You can also grab just the audio from that transcript page, too.

Just keep in mind that the video is BETTER than just the audio, because Brian shows SLIDES in the video, with quotes and diagrams.

Here are the main points in their discussion:

Brian’s personal testimony, going from atheism to Christianity
Brian’s thermodynamic argument against a naturalistic origin of life
The minimum requirements of a simple living system
Can natural selection be invoked to explain the origin of life naturalistically?
The role of experimenter interference in origin of life experiments
Evidence for engineering in biological systems
The requirement for a minimum level of information just to maintain the basic functions of the cell
The problem of the origin of biological information present in the first living system
Implications for theories about life emerging on other planets
Additional evidence for biological big bangs in the fossil record

If you’re looking for something to read, and send to your friends who also like to read, you can send them Brian’s chapter – chapter #14 – from the new second edition of “The Mystery of Life’s Origin“.

Here is what it is about:

The thermodynamic barriers to the origin of life have become decidedly more well defined since this book’s first publication. The initial challenges described in the original edition still stand. Namely, spontaneous natural processes always tend toward states of greater entropy, lower energy, or both. The change of entropy and energy are often combined into the change of free energy, and all spontaneous processes move toward lower free energy. However, the generation of a minimally functional cell on the ancient Earth required a local system of molecules to transition into a state of both lower entropy and higher energy. Therefore, it must move toward dramatically higher free energy. The chance of a system accomplishing this feat near equilibrium is astronomically small.

Many origin-of-life researchers have responded to this challenge by arguing that a system driven far from equilibrium could self-organize into a functional cell through processes that are connected to such monikers as complex systems, emergence, synergetics, or nonequilibrium dissipative systems. The basic hope is that some new physical principles could overcome the barriers to life’s origin mandated by classical thermodynamics. However, advances in nonequilibrium thermodynamics have proven that the odds of a system driven far from equilibrium generating an autonomous cell are no greater than the odds for one near equilibrium.

Others have proposed that “natural engines” on the early Earth converted one form of energy into another that could drive a local system to sufficiently high free energy. These approaches have proven equally disappointing. The only plausible explanation for the origin of life is intelligent agency.

He seems to be saying that a living system exhibits low entropy, and high free energy. And that there is no known naturalistic mechanism that can produce a result like that, without an intelligent agent to guide it. I wonder if I will have to add this to my list of arguments against naturalism.

Then it would grow to: