Page 474 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

In a letter to Joseph Hooker in 1871, Darwin wrote:

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism
are now present, which could ever have been present. But if we could conceive in
some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light,
heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed

ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter
would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the
case before living creatures were formed. 7

In short, Darwin maintained that if a small, warm pond con-
tained the chemical raw materials for life, they could form pro-
Lazzaro Spallanzani teins which could then multiply, and combine to

form a cell. Moreover, he

asserted that such a formation was
impossible under present world con-
ditions, but could have occurred in an
earlier period.
Both of Darwin's claims are pure

speculation, without scientific foun-
dation.
Louis Pasteur's sci-
But they would inspire those entific experiments

evolutionists who came after him demolished the
dogma that life
and launch them on a fruitless could be born out
labor that would last for more of inanimate matter.
Thus the very first
than a century.
link in the illusory
This hopeless effort rested on evolutionary chain
that Darwinism pro-
an error defended for centuries,
posed came to a
and which also misled Darwin, dead end.
that life is of pure chance and nat-

ural law.

Since that time, more than a century has passed, and thousands of
scientists have tried to explain the origins of life in terms of evolu-
tion. Two scientists who cleared a new path in this search were
Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane—one Russian, the other
English, but both Marxists. They advanced the theory known as
"chemical evolution," and proposed, as Darwin had dreamed of
doing, that molecules—the raw material of life—could, with the
addition of energy, evolve spontaneously and form a living cell.

In the middle of the 20th century, Oparin's and
Haldane's theory gained ground because the true complex-

ity of life wasn't yet understood. And a young chemist by
the name of Stanley Miller gave apparent scientific support
for the "chemical evolution" thesis.

Darwin's book, The Origin of Species

472 Atlas of Creation Vol. 3