You're mistaking a rhetorical device for a scientific explanation. Linking the questions about the ultimate origin of life to the spontaneous generation topic is using an analogy, no different to using the analogy of water flowing through pipes to introduce a discussion of the flow of electrical current. There are similarities and differences between an analogy and its target concept. It's very clear that Pasteur's experiments are completely irrelevant to the issue of the initial origin of life on earth: among other reasons because Pasteur was looking for life at the macroscopic level of maggots, not at the level of extremely simple single-celled organisms, and not under the kinds of conditions that might (yep, there's that word again) have allowed such organisms to arise.

Look, no-one is saying it's easy to account for the origin of life without divine intervention. I personally am saying I believe it required divine intervention. But you need to get beyond the over-simplifications and rhetoric of high school textbooks if you're going to engage seriously with this issue.

Part of my work looks at explanations in science education. There are everyday explanations, scientific explanations, and science teaching explanations. Features of anthropomorphism, teleology, analogy and metaphor that are not acceptable in scientific explanations are acceptable - indeed essential - features of science teaching explanations... and the explanations in textbooks are science teaching explanations, not scientific explanations.

Are you suggesting that the quote from the textbook is wrong? Or, rather, that it is merely a "teaching device"/ Here is the quote:

"This section presents the current scientific view of events on the early Earth. These hypotheses, however, are based on a relatively small amount of evidence...A stew of organic molecules is a long way from a living cell, and the leap from nonlife to life is the greatest gap in scientific theories of earth's early history..."

So, then, according to you, this statement is just a "teaching device"? Is it correct, or incorrect? Correct, indeed! And all they have to go on IS a "relatively small amount of evidence." Much conjecture and speculation. More of a belief system that doing science. Indeed, the belief system drives the speculation. Since their version of 'science' does not recognize the hand of God, then, of course, that belief will color how the evidence is viewed, and will have an effect simiilar to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Agreed in all points.

I deny that the sentence used in the textbook should be relegated to a mere rhetorical device as though being a "rhetorical device" means it must be any less a factual explanation of what scientists thought Pasteur's experiments had done in destroying the theory of spontaneous generation. I find much the same point made in other books written by evolutionists:

The Encyclopedia Britannica article, "Life," (p. 900):

"The idea of spontaneous generation died hard. Even though it was proved that the larger animals always came from eggs, there was still hope for the smaller ones, the micro-organisms...Pouchet was arguing [against Pasteur] that life must somehow arise from non-living matter; if not, how had life come about in the first place?...Pasteur's work [of disproving the theory of spontaneous generation] discouraged many scientists from discussing the origin of life at all."

Do you also want to argue that these are rhetorical devices? I assure you they are not. I studied rhetoric as a graduate student and know rhetorical devices when I see them. These statements, rather, are matter-of-fact descriptions of the debate that was going on in the scientific community of that day and of how Pasteur's work was effecting the understanding of how life came into being. I offer the following as partial evidence:

This, from Daniel J. Boorstin's highly respected bestseller, The Discoverers:

"The idea of species would be usefully defined, developed, and applied by biologists long before the notion of spontaneous generation was laid to rest. And the issue was unresolved because it had theological overtones. Radical scientists found the idea of spontaneous generation useful for their natural-scientific explanation for the origin of life, which would have made God's role in the Creation superfluous. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), the ambitious and hardheaded son of a French tanner, a faithful conservative Catholic and a brilliant experimentalist, saw the matter differently. To him an orderly concept of species was necessary for God's creative work in the Beginning."

The book, Modern Biology: "With this experiment Pasteur claimed to have 'driven partisans of the doctrine of spontaneous generation into the corner.' The theory died a sudden death. Biogenesis, the theory that living organisms come only from other living organisms, became a cornerstone of biology" (p 207).



How "extremely simple" are those single celled organisms? This is what one article in the Encyclopedia Britannica says about the "very simplest one-celled organisms:"

"Even procaryotes are exceedingly complicated organisms and very highly evolved." (Article on "Life", p. 903) What are the odds that even these so-called simple cells would have just accidently arisen out of complex, lifeless, organic, chemical compounds?




But if you believe in the necessity of divine intervention, why not believe in how the Bible says the universe and human life came into being? At what point in the Genesis account do you believe it becomes reliable history and ceases to be mythical or symbolic?



See above where I showed from other sources that previous statements about spontaneous generation are not "over-simplifications and rhetoric of high school textbooks" but are descriptions of what was going on in the scientific community in regards to the discussions about the origin of life.



Ok, I understand that. But I think you will see from the above quotes taken from several different works that the discussion of Pasteur's proofs against spontaneous generation are in the context, not merely of maggots, but of theories of life's origins and of the necessity of God's existence.

Darwin himself believed that it was useless to discuss origins apart from God. That is not something most evolutionists believe today. Most accept the theory of spontaneous generation under new language and say it must have happened, even though there is no actual proof that it ever did happen or that it ever could have happened. Aristotle, also, anciently believed in spontaneous generation, but after Pasteur disproved it and left it for dead, modern science resurrected it and expressed it in new, scientific language, in order to avoid the necessity of a Creator. IMO it will never be any more than a theory that, tragically, gives millions of people the illusion that God is not necessary or does not exist.

You forget - the theory of evolution has ALL modern life forms be the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution - today's prokaryotes are as much a product of the mutate/replicate/select mechanism as you or I in this theory.

Hence no-one is claiming that a modern cell came together spontaneously.



at the point where it does not directly contradict extensive evidence that God has made available for us to examine

/Bevin

There is a problem with that statement--first, you appear to be placing your interpretation of stuff from the past, over the Bible. It is not the items themselves, it is what you have decided about them, and that is what you have set up as your standard of authority, to understand and interpret the Bible. And, that type of approach is exalting one's ideas about nature, over the written Word. There are, indeed, various revelations of God. Nature is one of them, but it is not supreme, for a number of reasons. The Bible is the final authority. We should not exalt nature over the written Word. Even more so, we should not exalt our ideas about nature, or about its past, over the written Word.