In his book, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God, John Lennox quotes a number of scientists who admit their ignorance about the origin of life:
- One of the most eminent scientists working on the origin of life, Leslie Orgel, summed up the position as follows: "There are several tenable theories about the origin of organic material on the primitive earth, but in no case is the supporting evidence compelling."
- Orgel echoes the view Klaus Dose, also a prominent scientist working on origin-of-life issues, who stated, "At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance."
- Francis Crick, not known to be sympathetic to the miraculous, nevertheless wrote, "The origin of life seems almost to be a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."
- Stuart Kauffman from the Santa Fe Institute claims, "Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows."
- Finally, Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project, said, "How did self-replicating organisms arise in the first place? It is fair to say that at the present time we simply do not know."