The supposed development of living organisms from nonliving matter. Also called autogenesis, spontaneous generation.
Medical Dictionary: The Free Dictionary.com

Island muddy pond, photo credit: Chris 73

Have you gotten to study about Louis Pasteur yet? Besides his work on preventing germs from spoiling your milk (Pasteurization) and immunization, he is most famous for proving that spontaneous generation is impossible. Which is why people today switched out this debunked idea for the much cooler “abiogenesis”.

What is spontaneous generation, and what do evolution and creationism have to say about it?

Spontaneous generation is the idea that life comes from non-life. From the time of the Greeks, people thought something like this must happen to make freshwater eels because they never saw any eggs.

People in the 1600s had the idea that maggots just came to life on pieces of meat from nowhere. A scientist called Francesco Redi did experiments that showed that the maggots come from the eggs that flies lay. Without flies you have no maggots.

Scientists have never seen a plant or animal come to life without a parent

Creationists say that God is the only one who never came into being since He IS, and time itself is one of God’s designs. This means that God goes infinitely backwards and forward in time (and sideways since He’s everywhere at once). So, all genealogies of living things have God at the end of the list of great, great, grandparents. Luke says this clearly about people in Luke 3:38:

Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.

God is the ultimate ‘parent’ and we are all His offspring Acts 17:28:

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

Naturalistic Evolutionists have to say that life came from mindless non-life. They must believe in spontaneous generation. This makes evolutionists very uncomfortable, so they’ve renamed this process “abiogenic origin” [life from non-life] or abiogenesis.

Sounds so much smarter doesn’t it?

But does this idea hold water? What about this foundational understanding of the nature of the world?

All living organisms are composed of cells, and all cells arise from other cells. Biology Reference

And good luck finding any lab experiment that goes beyond a few simple bits of chemicals coming together to form a “simple” cell.
Those who desperately want to not see God our Creator find lots of little things they say could have come together to make something new. They point to experiments working with living cells and moving things around or rewriting what was already in the DNA. But there is nothing in science that comes even close to showing how some cell could come into being without anything guiding it.
A cell needs to do a lot of things, just for starters it has to:
  • process food
  • clean out poisons
  • not fall apart
  • adjust to changing conditions
  • have babies

All at the same time. All by itself.

That last one… even if by some miracle a ‘cell’ could develop all alone, do you have any idea how complicated the mechanisms are for making a copy so there is a new cell?

Because this whole idea is so impossible, evolutionists try to avoid discussions about where the first life came from altogether. Check this debate intro from Creation Today:

“[The guy on the evolution side] defended the evolution worldview and even admitted that he pretended to believe in God to avoid answering the question of abiogenesis…. It took until near the end of the debate for him to admit he really was an atheist. We believe that his invention of a god for that evening was purely to avoid the issue of where life came from as he stated several times he was just discussing common descent and that abiotic origin was not evolution.”

That’s because it didn’t happen that way!!!

God is so great, so smart that He made even the ‘simplest’ living things so complicated no one could miss that they were created.

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;  Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; Acts 17:24,25

More on this topic: The Miller Urey Experiment: Proof for What?


Cheri Fields

I'm a homeschooling blogger and book writer. The gift God has given me for His kingdom is to understand complex stuff (mostly) and share it with others using everyday words. It is a joy to share God's wonders with all kinds of people and especially the next generation!

14 Comments

synapticcohesion · at

Yes, evolution is playing into man’s primitive believe in abiogenesis, or spontaneous generation. Life apparently coming from non-life–just because the organisms were too small to see with the naked eye.

    creationscience4kids · at

    Your right, but I wouldn’t use the word “primitive” myself, because the most “primitive” [for the kids: primative= having to do with the first] you can get is Adam, and he knew where everything came from. I’d say, “people who didn’t want to admit that God made everything and couldn’t see what was really happening.” 😀 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/primitive

      synapticcohesion · at

      You’re right. I found some better synonyms for that word: childlike, naive, simple, undeveloped, unsophisticated, untrained, untutored. 🙂

forhisgloryandpraise · at

Tag, you’re it! Somehow, I ended up in a game of tag and I’m now tagging you! Here is the link with the rules and the one question I picked out for you to answer… http://forhisgloryandpraise.wordpress.com/

    creationscience4kids · at

    Thanks, I think!!!

    Hmmm, good question for me. I don’t want to cover up my newest post yet, so that will give me time to think. I know what Dr. Lisle’s answer to this is, so I’ll probably borrow his and put it in my own words. :-p

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