Links to elsewhere on this Web site: /apologetics.html /book.html /doctrinal.html /essays.html /links.html / sermonettes.html /webmaster.html For the home page, click here: /index.html Does Islam cause terrorism? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Moral Equivalency Applied Islamic History 0409.htm Is the Bible God’s Word? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Is the Bible the Word of God.htm Why does God Allow Evil? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm Is Christian teaching from ancient paganism? /Bookhtml/Paganism influence issue article Journal 013003.htm Which is right?: Judaism or Christianity? /Apologeticshtml/Is Christianity a Fraud vs Conder Round 1.htm /Apologeticshtml/Is Christianity a Fraud vs Conder Round 2.htm Should God’s existence be proven? /Apologeticshtml/Should the Bible and God Be Proven Fideism vs WCG.htm Does the Bible teach blind faith? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Gospel of John Theory of Knowledge.htm Spontaneous Generation Is Impossible Eric V. Snow Is spontaneous generation possible? The biggest hurdle for the theory of evolution is the creation of the first cell, since the processes of natural selection and genetic mutation are inapplicable at that point. Instead, the first self-replicating cell had to occur by random probabilistic chance. Many evolutionists, when they feel candid, have made concessions on this subject, which destroys the intellectual foundation of their entire materialistic worldview. For example, the physicist H.S. Lipson, Physics Bulletin, 1980, Vol. 31, p. 138, once conceded. “The only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.” Obviously, he made this public admission only under the strongest kind of intellectual compulsion; he wasn’t optimistically sanguine about the possibility that spontaneous generation could have occurred. Evolutionist Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York, 1957), p. 199 admitted the philosophical inconsistency of his own side about this matter: “After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a 1 mythology of its own: Namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be prove to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.” Dr. George Wald, a Nobel prize winner and Harvard biology professor, “The Origin of Life,” The Physics and Chemistry of Life (Simon and Shuster, 1955), p. 9, made this concession: “One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are--as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.” If Christians had the same amount of faith as this evolutionist, they would be moving mountains daily as warm-up exercises! Perhaps for this reason and others, Wald eventually ended up embracing some kind of pantheism, although he was an agnostic or atheist when making this confession. The results of “origin of life experiments” and other research haven’t improved the situation any since the mathematician J.W.N. Sullivan, Reader’s Digest, January 1963, p. 92, confessed: “The hypothesis that life has developed from inorganic matter is, at present, still an article of faith.” So with a sufficient number of eons and oceans, would life inevitably occur by chance? Time cannot be the hero of the plot for evolutionists when even many billions of years are insufficient. But this can only be known when the mathematical probabilities involved are carefully quantified, which is crucial to all scientific observations. That is, specific mathematical equations describing what scientists observed need to be set up in order to describe how likely or unlikely this or that event was. But so long as evolutionists tell a general “just-so” story without specific mathematical descriptions, much like the ancient pagan creation myths retold over the generations, many listeners will find their tale persuasive. For example, upon the first recounting, listeners may find it plausible to believe the evolutionists’ story about the first living cell arising by random chance out of a “chemical soup” in the world’s oceans. But after specific mathematical calculations are applied to their claim, it is plainly absurd to believe in spontaneous generation, which says life comes from non-living