Articles

SPONTANEOUS GENERATION

By Lanny and Marilyn Johnson

For a long time, people thought that living things came from non-living things (spontaneous generation). They thought that mud turned into frogs and old rags turned into rats! Some even thought that spoiled meat turned into white worms!

In the late 17th century a man named Francesco Redi did an experiment to see if meat did turn into worms. He put meat into three separate jars. One jar he left open. Another jar he covered with fine cloth (gauze) and the third he covered with parchment paper (much like wax paper). The meat spoiled in all three jars. Redi noticed that white worms appeared on the meat of the uncovered jar and on the jar covered with gauze. The jar with parchment paper had no worms. He did the experiment again, and saw that as the meat spoiled, flies were crawling all over the meat in the open jar and the gauze of the cloth covered jar. No flies landed on the jar with parchment. By careful observation, Redi saw that the flies could smell the rotting meat from the open jar and would fly in and lay their eggs directly onto the meat. They could also smell the spoiled meat in the jar covered with gauze, but could not get to the meat, so they laid their eggs on the gauze. The parchment paper trapped the smell of the meat inside the jar, so the flies could not smell it and did not lay any eggs upon the paper. After a short time the eggs hatched into white worms (maggots or fly larvae). Redi showed that the white worms did not come from the dead meat, but came from living flies. Redi had proved that life only comes from life. Yet scientists would not believe him because it didn’t fit with what they believed at that time.

A hundred years later, a scientist named Spellanzani did more experiments to show Redi was right. But scientists still refused to believe the evidence. Almost 200 years after Redi, Louis Pasteur did more experiments which once again proved that life can only come from life.

Other men did experiments too, and discovered that rags do not turn into rats. Rag piles were just places rats liked to have their babies! The frogs that seemed to come from mud actually came from frog eggs. A new universal law of science was discovered called the Law of Biogenesis . Bio – means life. Genesis means beginning. Scientists know that in the world today there is no way that life can simply begin on its own. We know life only comes from other life.

God wrote about the idea of biogenesis thousands of years before man accepted it. “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.” [Genesis 1:21-22].

Life did not come from non-living things, but was created by God! He also created all living things to be able to reproduce their own kind … in other words living things coming from living things. The idea of evolution teaches that millions of years ago life came from non-life. You can see that evolution not only goes against the laws of nature, but also against the Word of God!

http://www.discovercreation.org/kids/documents/KTBSeptemberandOctober2009.pdf