Poof! I Exist!
The Reformation (or The Holy Butt Kickin of 1517 as I like to call it) weakened the Papal Church by the 1600s. The Church had dominated the political and scientific and publishing world for generations. The flood of information and ideas that could be discussed openly and without fear of the fluffy pillows of the Inquisition were intoxicating to intellectuals and scholars of the day. So the 1600s were dubbed the Age of Reason -probably because the title sounded cool, but later on in the 1800s they decided it sounded old and optimistically began to call this intellectual orgy “The Enlightenment”. It was a time when all those things that the Roman Catholic Church had forbid suddenly became accessible. Ideas no longer had to be scrutinized for doctrinal integrity and anyone could explore a myriad of ways of thinking without risking being called a heretic. Or at least they could be a heretic without having to suffer the Papal consequences of heresy. Philosophy no longer had the church as its editor. Many scholars wanted to make sure the Church didn’t take over again and so they hired a new editor and chief: Science! And as one of this new governors’ first acts early in the “Enlightenment” the idea of Spontaneous Generation was reintroduced as a replacement for the biblical account of the orgin of life. This served a very important purpose. If science (or “man”) could find answers to plaguing questions of the populous then God would no longer be needed to explain the mysteries of the universe and then more importantly the church would not have the authority to dictate its answers. This developed into what were lovingly termed Brand New Ideas. These “Brand New Ideas” were supposedly an example of what could be accomplished from the progress of the freed collective mind. In actuality however someone had found these ideas in a big clump of moldy leftovers in the back of a lab frig.
You see, Thales around 600 BC declared water to be the “First Principle” or the origin of life partly because he observed that ordinary drinking water left alone for a while would spring to life with plants like mold and algae and even all sorts of tiny animals like mosquito larvae and other nasty stuff. I am afraid that this says more about the state of the drinking water in Greece at the time than it does about the origins of life. Nevertheless, the idea of “Spontaneous Generation” was born.
It was not until Aristotle in the middle 300s BC that this idea was expounded upon as a origin of life. He observed that fleas came from putrid matter, maggots from uncooked meat; plant lice (aphids) sprang from the dew which falls on plants; even things as big as rats could appear in old straw. For Aristotle somewhere there was a piece of matter that if left alone would produce a man. He theorized that these things popped through from another reality. But to be honest philosophers of that day were much more focused on the meaning of life rather than its origin. The working assumption was that man and creation had existed forever.
to be continued…
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