Page 122 - The importance of conscience in the Qur'an

120 The Importance of Conscience in the Qur'an

Advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these find-
ings for a long time. 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 in the Twentieth Century
The first evolutionist who took up the subject of the ori-
gin 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 confession:
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. 5
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out exper-
iments 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 primor-
dial Earth's atmosphere in an experiment set-up, and adding
energy to the mixture, Miller synthesized several organic mol-
ecules (amino acids) present in the structure of proteins.
Barely a few years had passed before it was revealed that
this experiment, which was then presented as an important
step in the name of evolution, was invalid, for the atmosphere
used in the experiment was very different from the real Earth
conditions. 6
After a long silence, Miller confessed that the atmosphere