Two Places Natural Science Still Doesn't Have an Answer

September 2026

This site keeps an honest list of what’s actually still open — see Gaps in Science. Two of the eleven are worth pulling out and looking at directly, because they get treated very differently in public conversation than they’re treated in the actual literature: where the universe came from, and how life began.

What’s actually settled, so this doesn’t get misread

This is not a claim that evolution — common descent, natural selection acting on existing life — is unproven. That’s a different question with a different evidence base: convergent fossil, genetic, and comparative-anatomy evidence spanning multiple independent fields.¹ Nothing below touches that. What follows is about two specific, upstream questions: what set the universe in motion, and how the first living cell arose from non-living chemistry.

These two also aren’t identical to each other, or to this site’s other physics gaps like dark matter and quantum gravity, which are missing pieces of current physical law. The origin of the universe carries some of that same flavor — physics itself runs out at the singularity, and closing that gap is a law problem, quantum gravity. The origin of life is a different kind of open question again: not a hole in current physical law, but an unresolved piece of one-time chemical history. Worth naming plainly rather than treating all of it as one undifferentiated pile of “science doesn’t know.”

Origin of the universe

The standard Big Bang model describes the universe’s evolution from an early hot, dense state extremely well — that part isn’t in dispute. What it doesn’t do is give a physical account of what came before that state, or whether “before” and “caused” are even the right words to use. General relativity’s own equations predict infinite density at the initial singularity, which physicists read as the classical theory reaching the edge of where it applies, not as a measured infinite state.² Closing that gap would take a working theory of quantum gravity, and while there are live research programs aimed at one, none is yet established enough to say it settles the question.²

How life began

Abiogenesis — the jump from non-living chemistry to a self-replicating cell — has no complete, established pathway. A 2025 review in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B puts it directly: “the necessary conditions for these processes often appear incompatible and are seldom found together in a single environment.”³ A separate 2021 review in Communications Chemistry frames the deepest piece of it this way: how genetic inheritance and biochemical information first connected is “perhaps the largest open question in the emergence of life.”⁴ Real, experimentally-grounded progress exists on individual pieces of the puzzle; a validated, end-to-end route from chemistry to a living, evolving cell does not.

Why this belongs here, stated narrowly

Not as a claim that a naturalistic explanation is impossible — that would overclaim exactly the way this site tries not to, and an open research problem isn’t the same thing as a positive case against natural mechanisms. The claim is narrower: on these two specific questions, “science has explained this” isn’t accurate yet. Naming that plainly is what this site already does for dark matter, dark energy, and quantum gravity — these two belong in that same honest accounting, even though the shape of the gap differs from one entry to the next.

What this article doesn’t do is draw a further conclusion from that gap. STU’s own discipline is to use what’s known and observed to theorize about the unseen,⁵ which means stopping at the honest boundary of what’s actually established rather than reaching past it. What these two open questions might mean beyond physics is a real question, just not one this site is positioned to answer — for that fuller, explicitly theological treatment, see What Science Still Can’t Explain About Where We Came From on believersforChrist.com.