Yahya - Justice and Tolerance in the Qur'an (2003)

THE EVOLUTION MISCONCEPTION
73
However, five years after the publication of Darwin's
book, Louis Pasteur announced his results after long studies
and experiments, which disproved spontaneous generation,
a cornerstone of Darwin's theory. In his triumphal lecture at
the Sorbonne in 1864, Pasteur said, "Never will the doctrine of
spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this
simple experiment." 52
Advocates of the theory of evolution resisted the findings
of Pasteur for a long time. However, as the development of
science unraveled the complex structure of the cell of a living
being, the idea that life could come into being coincidentally
faced an even greater impasse.
Inconclusive Efforts in the Twentieth Century
The first evolutionist who took up the subject of the
origin of life in the twentieth century was the renowned
Russian biologist Alexander Oparin. With various theses he
advanced in the 1930's, he tried to prove that the cell of a
living being could originate by coincidence. These studies,
however, were doomed to failure, and Oparin had to make
the following confession: "Unfortunately, however, the
problem of the origin of the cell is perhaps the most obscure
point in the whole study of the evolution of organisms." 53
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out
experiments to solve the problem of the origin of life. The
best known of these experiments was carried out by
American chemist Stanley Miller in 1953. Combining the
gases he alleged to have existed in the primordial earth's
atmosphere in an experiment set-up, and adding energy to
the mixture, Miller synthesized several organic molecules