Page 514 - Learning from the Qur'an

the laws of nature, without any design, plan or arrangement. According to
the theory, inanimate matter must have produced a living cell as a result of
coincidences. Such a claim, however, is inconsistent with the most unassailable
rules of biology.
"Life Comes from Life"
In his book, Darwin never referred to the origin of life. The primitive
understanding of science in his time rested on the assumption that living
beings had a very simple structure. Since medieval times, spontaneous
generation, which asserts that non-living materials came together to form
living organisms, had been widely accepted. It was commonly believed that
insects came into being from food leftovers, and mice from wheat. Interesting
experiments were conducted to prove this theory. Some wheat was placed on
a dirty piece of cloth, and it was believed that mice would originate from it after
a while.
Similarly, maggots developing in rotting meat was assumed to be evidence
of spontaneous generation. However, it was later understood that worms did
not appear on meat spontaneously, but were carried there by flies in the form
of larvae, invisible to the naked eye.
Even when Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the belief that bacteria
could come into existence from non-living matter was widely accepted in the
world of science.
However, five years after the publication of Darwin's book, Louis Pasteur
announced his results after long studies and experiments, that disproved
spontaneous generation, a cornerstone 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." 18
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 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 coincidence. These studies, however, were doomed to
failure, and Oparin had to make the following confession:

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