Several years ago our State school board announced that it was updating its list of approved textbooks.  Citizens were invited to review samples of the textbooks at their public libraries.  I was curious, so I went to take a look.  I was fascinated by the first two chapters of the High School biology curricula.  Each book began with a brief history of the modern scientific method of research and discovery.  They gave examples of how commonly believed assumptions were proven false by simple experiments.  One such misconception was called "spontaneous generation," which said that living plants and animals can spring from non-living matter.  For example, if you leave a piece of dead meat out in the open, within a few days you will see little worms emerging from the meat.  Francesco Redi and Louis Pasteur did simple experiments to prove that the theory of spontaneous generation was false.  The worms that people saw growing from dead meat were the larvae of flies that laid their eggs in the meat.  Conclusion: There is no such thing as spontaneous generation... or is there?

Chapter two in each science book went on to say that in spite of Redi's and Pasteur's discoveries, at some unknown time in pre-history, life really did spring from non-living matter.  The books even described unsuccessful attempts to validate this assumption through failed experiments to assemble life-supporting proteins from non-living hydrocarbons. (Look up abiogenesis in Wikipedia to see a long list of theories "of how life on Earth could have arisen from inanimate matter.")

This obvious contradiction still amuses me.  Christian evolutionists resolve the contradiction by suggesting that God was the spark which ignited the primordial soup and supernaturally (magically?) assembled a living cell, and then God retreated while that cell transformed itself into all species of plants and animals. The famous molecular biologist Francis Crick "solved" the dilemma with a theory that the seed of life on earth was planted here millions of years ago by highly advanced creatures from another planet. What creatures? From what galaxy? And how did life begin there?  Crick had no answers.  Surprisingly, Crick's theory of "directed panspermia" is popular among many outspoken evolutionists today.

God's own description of His work "in the beginning" still works for me.  After all, He was there!