Page 58 - Love in the Gospel

studies and experiments, which disproved spontaneous generation, a cor-
nerstone of Darwin's theory. In his triumphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864,
Pasteur said: "Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover
from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment." (Sidney Fox, Klaus
Dose, Molecular Evolution and The Origin of Life, W. H. Freeman and Company, San
Francisco, 1972, p. 4.)

For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted Pasteur's
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.

F Futile Efforts in 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 chance. These studies, however, were doomed to fail-
ure, 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.
LOVE IN THE GOSPEL this problem. The best-known experiment was carried out by the American
(Alexander I. Oparin, Origin of Life, Dover Publications, New York, 1936,
1953 and 2003 (reprint), p. 196)

Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experiments to solve

chemist Stanley Miller in 1953. Combining those gases he alleged to have ex-
isted in the primordial Earth's atmosphere in an experimental set-up, and
adding energy to the mixture, Miller synthesized several organic molecules
56 (amino acids) present in the structure of proteins.