Reason #2 The Scientific Impossibility of Spontaneous Generation
Life is complex and awe-inspiring, and it didn't come into being by spontaneous generation.
Sure, we all smile
now when we speak of Belgian chemist Jean
Baptiste van Helmont (1580-1644). He believed mice came into our world through
spontaneous generation—the supposed rise of life from non-life. He taught his
students:
"If a soiled shirt is placed in the
opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat, the reaction of the leaven in
the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days,
transform the wheat into mice."
Of course, that’s not quite right.
It was Louis Pasteur who orchestrated the
final triumph of science over the error of spontaneous generation. He was given
an award in 1862 from the Paris Academy of Sciences for disproving once and for
all the theory of spontaneous generation. He concluded, “Life only comes from
life,” and he is the one who referred to spontaneous generation as a doctrine.
“Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow
of this simple experiment.”
Indeed, all our biology text books agree
with Louis Pasteur. Except when they try to defend naturalistic evolution.
Atheistic evolution is utterly dependent
on the doctrine of spontaneous generation, or abiogenesis as it is more
commonly referred to now. According to this view, all life sprang forth from
the original non-life of the Big Bang, etc.
But if, as we are taught in school, the
scientific method requires a conclusion to be testable, observable, repeatable,
and falsifiable, then naturalistic evolution, with its reliance on spontaneous
generation, should never be honored as a science-based belief. While we actually observe the “life
from life” principle every day, spontaneous generation has never been observed,
not even once. A person may believe in it as a doctrine, to use Pasteur’s term,
but not as a scientific reality.
Nobel Prize-winning physiologist George
Wald summarized the position of atheism perfectly: “We choose to believe the
impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance.”
The joke is on us as long as our favorite
scientists laugh at van Helmont’s ignorance and then, with an appropriately
somber tone, teach us that mice, actually, do not come from “shirt leaven” and
“wheat fumes,” but from “soup”—the non-living primordial soup of
prehistory.
If spontaneous generation was a
cringe-worthy idea for van Helmont in the 1600s, then it’s also a cringe-worthy
idea today, and a “doctrine” that needs to be challenged by actual scientific
observations.
Science is solidly on the side of
believers, not atheists, in this matter.
Science would never lead you to believe in
spontaneous generation. Quite the opposite!
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