By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 16
Where does life come from? Can lifeless matter produce a living organism all by itself, as evolutionists claim, or is it a product of divine creation? I remember the many arguments I had in high school against the evolutionist teacher, who tried his best to persuade the classroom that life can come spontaneously from lifeless matter.
It was funny to see his face when I proved to him that as early as 1864, the Catholic scientist Louis Pasteur destroyed the evolutionist theory of spontaneous generation, which had been taken for granted by pretty much everyone, both good and bad, including Catholics.
As it was seen as a mere scientific matter, no great Catholic scholar wasted time investigating it. But since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, it became necessary to study the matter more closely. And why? Because Darwin’s evolutionary theory ultimately affirmed the racist concept that all men do not spring from the same couple, but from different ape-like species, and therefore there would be superior and inferior races.
That explains why some British folks who believed in Darwin’s theories of evolution hunted aborigines in Australia as though they were animals and Hitler tried to get rid of human species considered inferior. The superior animal predates the inferior one. The survival of the fittest. Predator and prey.
The teaching of the Catholic Church is clear. Life is a creation of God. But the Church leaves it open to scientists to research nature to discover if God empowered nature with properties to evolve by itself, developing properties He had already given, or if He created the species as they are (permanentism). What the Church cannot accept is the idea that man’s intellect and spiritual soul are the result of the evolution of matter. In fact, it is anti-scientific to affirm it does. Whether or not one species becomes another is not a theological matter; it is irrelevant to salvation. It is a matter to be sorted out by unbiased science. Even the idea that life can emerge from lifeless matter is not relevant to salvation. But it is not true.
And this is precisely what Louis Pasteur proved.
The old theory of spontaneous generation affirmed that some forms of life can emerge from lifeless matter. So, people believed that maggots did spontaneously emerge from putrefying flesh, or that the moist earth produced frogs and old cloths left in a basement could produce mice. That was the original evolution theory, which was disproved in very simple terms in the 19th century. Frogs do not come out of the moist earth; they come out of frogs’ fecundated eggs. Mice are produced by other mice, not old shirts. Maggots are not produced by putrefying flesh; they grow in putrefying flesh from the eggs dropped there by insects.
But still, scientists who desperately clung to the evolution theory still affirmed that at least bacteria could emerge by themselves from certain lifeless materials. Louis Pasteur proved them wrong. He proved that all life forms — including bacteria — come from a previous life form. Or, as he put it, all life comes from a living cell. The theory of spontaneous generation, or evolution, was proven wrong, good and proper, and for good.
After Pasteur, evolutionist fanatics tried to circumvent his conclusion by saying that in the course of millions of years, a living cell did emerge from the chance combination of the chemical elements present in a pond of water, and there we have the “proof” of evolution.
The poor fanatics failed to realize that time does not change the reality that life only comes from life. The proponents of spontaneous generation believed that in a matter of a few weeks mice would emerge from the old shirt left in the basement, but whether they believed they emerged in a few weeks or a few centuries, it does not change reality: They emerged from their parent mice. Period. Not from the old shirt.
Nevertheless, evolution of life from lifeless matter is taught in our public schools to this day. . . . It is a religious myth to affirm that lifeless matter has the power to produce life all by itself.
The laws of nature are invariable; they always produce the same results. No one had ever been able to produce a maggot or a larva of any kind in a laboratory.
A living cell is such a complicated structure that can be compared to a computer. And, unlike the computer, it is alive; it feeds, grows, and duplicates itself. What would you think of someone who tells you that his computer emerged from nature all by itself, without any human contribution? You would either roll on the floor laughing yourself to tears, or lock him up in an insane asylum, or both. And yet there are people who believe that the living cell, which is more complex than the computer, came by itself from the pond. . . . Oh, the divine pond!
Regarding the origin of the various species of plants and animals, the Church considers two options: a) permanentism, that is, God created each species individually, and let them grow and multiply according to their particular chromosomal constitution. And b) theistic evolution, that is, God empowered the species with particular properties to allow them to develop into other species.
Although one is free to believe in theistic evolution, it has become increasingly more difficult to do so with the advance of genetics, especially the discovery of chromosomes.
Once again, it was another contribution of the Catholic Church to the progress of science. Gregor Mendel was a monk who, through his work on pea plants, discovered the fundamental laws of inheritance. He deduced that genes come in pairs and are inherited as distinct units, one from each parent. Mendel tracked the segregation of parental genes and their appearance in the offspring as dominant or recessive traits.
An important conclusion of these laws of genetics is that a being cannot have a characteristic that was not present in his genes. More on that in the next lesson.
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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
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