Page 847 - An Index to the Qur'an

Darwin's theory. In his triumphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864,
Pasteur said: "Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation re-
cover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment." 1
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these
findings. However, as the development of science unraveled the com-
plex 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, how-
ever, were doomed to failure, and Oparin had to make the following
confession:
Unfortunately, however, the problem of the origin of the cell is per-
haps the most obscure point in the whole study of the evolution of
organisms. 2

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 al-
leged to have existed in the primordial Earth's atmosphere in an experi-
ment set-up, and adding energy to the mixture, Miller synthesized
several organic molecules (amino acids) present in the structure of pro-
teins.
Barely a few years had passed before it was revealed that this ex-
periment, 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. 3
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