According to this view, if an animal or a plant was ever spontaneously generated from inorganic matter, we would naturally expect to find them arising in the same manner today, for there is no reason to suppose that the nature of the “inorganic matter,” which they say produced the first animal or plant, has been exhausted; nor that it has changed; nor that the conditions have changed, nor that the forces which are supposed to have caused the spontaneous generation of the first animal and plant have ceased to exist.
Sec. 36. Proposition 3. No Spontaneous Generation of Animals; nor of Plants
Professor Huxley (1825-1905) was a scientist and philosopher of the first magnitude. He was an intimate friend to Darwin; an evolutionist and materialist of the strictest sect and fully competent to speak for these schools of philosophy. Among other works on evolution, he wrote, “Man’s Place in Nature” (1863), in which he argued at great length that man is a descendant of an ape. Hence the following quotations from his works may be taken as authoritative admissions on the part of the evolutionist and materialist.
He says:
“The fact is that at the present moment there is not a shadow of trustworthy direct evidence that abiogenesis [spontaneous generation] does take place, or has taken place, within the period during which the existence of life on the globe is recorded.” (Huxley, Anat. Invert. An., pp. 40-41.)
Writing in the Encyclopedia Britannica (9 ed., vol. 8, p. 746) he says, in substance, that the aphorism: “omne vivum ex vivo” (“all life comes of life”) is a “well established law of the existing course of nature.”
The theory of spontaneous generation assumes that certain inorganic elements, spontaneously and automatically grouped themselves together in such proportions and in such a manner, chemically and mechanically, as to produce one or a very few animals or plants; and that all other animals and plants have descended from this one, or these few primordial forms. No one pretends to say that there is any direct evidence that any such thing ever happened. On the contrary every fact within our knowledge tends to negative the theory of spontaneous generation. But, in order to dispense with the theory of special creation, the evolutionist and materialist invented the theory of spontaneous generation. There is not only no evidence to support the theory of spontaneous generation, but after many trials scientific men have wholly failed to produce any living substance, whatever. On this point Professor Huxley says:
“To enable us to say that we know anything about the experimental origination of organization and life, the investigator ought to be able to take inorganic matters, such as carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salines, in any sort of inorganic combination, and be able to build them up into protein matter [nitrogenous or albuminoid bodies] and that protein matter ought to begin to live in an organic form. That, nobody has done as yet; and I suspect it will be a long while before anybody does it.” (Huxley, Origin of Species, p. 69.) After discussing the theory of spontaneous generation at length, and describing the experiments which are supposed to have destroyed that theory, he says: