Page 276 - The Winter of Islam and the Spring to Come

THE WINTER OF ISLAM AND THE SPRING TO COME
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trine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck
by this simple experiment." 68
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these
findings. However, as the development of science unraveled the complex
structure of the cell of a living being, the idea that life could come into
being coincidentally faced an even greater impasse.

Inconclusive Efforts of the Twentieth Century
The first evolutionist who took up the subject of the origin of life in
the twentieth century was the renowned Russian biologist Alexander
Oparin. With various theses he advanced in the 1930s, he tried to prove
that a living cell could originate by coincidence. These studies, however,
were doomed to failure, and Oparin had to make the following confes-
sion:
Unfortunately, however, the problem of the origin of the cell is perhaps
the most obscure point in the whole study of the evolution of organisms. 69
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experiments to
solve this problem. The best known experiment was carried out by the
American chemist Stanley Miller in 1953. Combining the gases he alleged
to have existed in the primordial Earth's atmosphere in an experiment
set-up, and adding energy to the mixture, Miller synthesized several or-
ganic molecules (amino acids) present in the structure of proteins.

One example of evolutionists' at-
tempts to account for the origin of
life is the Miller experiment. It was
gradually realized that this experi-
ment, initially heralded as a major
advance on behalf of the theory of
evolution, was invalid, and Miller
was even forced to admit that very
fact himself.