For a long time people thought that living things came from non-living things … mud turned into frogs, old rags turned into rats, and rotten 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 two jars, one covered with fine gauze and the other left open. Redi observed that flies crawled all over the uncovered meat laying eggs, which later turned to fly larvae (white worms or maggots). There were no flies or eggs on the covered meat. Redi proved that life only comes from life. Yet scientists wouldn’t believe him because it didn’t fit the “science of the day”. In the 18th century, a scientist named Spellanzani did more experiments to prove Redi right. But scientists still refused to believe the evidence. Almost 200 years after Redi’s experiments, Louis Pasteur proved the Law of Biogenesis: life can only come from life.
The Bible describes biogenesis about 4500 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.” (Genesis 1:21) [See also Gen. 1:11, Gen. 1:24, and Gen. 1:25]. The phrase “after his/their kind” is used 10 times in Genesis 1, emphasizing the limitations of variation.
Even though spontaneous generation has been proven to be false, it is still a crucial part of the evolutionary idea that life evolved by chance from non-living chemicals.
