Romans 1:22
"How does life emerge from that which is not alive? This mystery exercises a peculiar fascination, with the power to elicit remarkable feats of imagination.
As the novelist Mary Shelley recalled, her invention of the story of Frankenstein traced back to conversations she witnessed between Lord Byron and her husband, Percy Shelley.
Holidaying in Switzerland in the summer of 1816, they spoke late into the night, past the “witching hour,” about “the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.”
Up for discussion was gossip about “experiments of Dr. Darwin” (Erasmus, the grandfather of Charles) who “by some extraordinary means” produced “voluntary motion” in a length of spaghetti. The poets alluded to “galvanism,” electrical experiments by Luigi Galvani, spurring thoughts that “a corpse would be reanimated.” Later, sleepless in her bed, Mrs. Shelley would experience a vision, receiving the seed for one of the great horror novels.
Less horrific but hardly less imaginative are scenarios of unguided “chemical evolution,” or abiogenesis, featured in high school and college biology textbooks, taken as gospel by the media and preached as such by a range of authoritative popular and scholarly figures in the culture.
Less horrific but hardly less imaginative are scenarios of unguided “chemical evolution,” or abiogenesis, featured in high school and college biology textbooks, taken as gospel by the media and preached as such by a range of authoritative popular and scholarly figures in the culture.
Simple experimental work by Louis Pasteur in the early 1860s demonstrated that life does not spontaneously generate itself, not from spaghetti, not from anything.
Instead,
life comes from life.
Q: How then may science explain the origin of the very first life?"
EN&V
