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The subsequent acceptance, however, by secular societies of Darwin's theories published in his 'Origin of Species' had a retrograde effect on the 'cell theory' which was subsequently modified to include an exception to the rule that only life begets life. Ironically this is the reverse of the conclusion drawn by Pasteur, which had brilliantly banished the hitherto dominant superstitions of spontaneous generation. His theory was a paradigm of what a scientific theory should be like. It drew a general conclusion about a common phenomenon, life, from detailed and carefully controlled experiments on specific instances of life. The cell theory commonly taught today, however, says that about 3.7 billion years ago the first simple cells arose spontaneously, not from other cells but from chemical reactions in a 'primordial sea' rich in nutrients. These primordial cells were said to have transformed the planet and given rise to the vast array of living things that we see today. While Pasteur produced specific tests for his theory, Darwin's theory was and is un-testable and that is poor science. Philosophers of science have been forced to rewrite their philosophy in order to redefine science so that the theory of evolution falls within its boundaries.
Now taking a step back, clearly the probability of a living cell arising by chance could never be expected to be high, and nobody claims otherwise. The odds against it perhaps being billions to one and yet just such an unlikely event is generally accepted by secular societies to have occurred once in the 4.5 billion year history of the earth.
Part of the reason for the prevalence of the view that life arose spontaneously, without the need for a supernatural explanation is the huge success of the reductionist approach of molecular biology following the advent of the gene cloning and sequencing revolution of the 1970s. The genetic revolution brought simple explanations for complex medical problems: a defective gene could be cloned and sequenced and found to be the culprit responsible for a disease. Science looks for the simple all encompassing answer and we look at the fantastic working of our bodies and bring explanations in terms of simple cells interacting with each other. Scientists talk about building blocks of life when referring to the molecules of which these cells are made. Any biology text book today will survey the animal kingdom and bring numerous examples of "simpler" animals that solve biological problems in a simpler way than our bodies do. The human heart is made of 4 chambers, but other creatures have less and so on. Through all this we reduce the complex to the simple in a series of stages that we feel more comfortable with. The wonder of life becomes a simple matter of studying its parts and breaking them down to the simplest units that we feel could plausibly have arisen by chance out of a primordial sea billions of years ago and evolved to the forms we see today.
Nevertheless, however simply the problem of spontaneous generation of life from chemistry is presented, it still is beyond our human experience: no one has ever seen it happen. Of course, improbable things do sometimes happen: the chance meeting of a long lost friend or winning the lottery, but just how long need we wait for planet earth to get lucky with the evolution of life? The earth is thought to be 4.5 billion years old, so is that long enough? It certainly seems like a long time, and we have grown accustomed to picturing our brief existence as a species as a small fraction of the time that the earth has existed. For this reason it has become easier to accept the idea that a fantastically rare and special event, such as the origin of life, could have occurred fortuitously because the earth is itself fantastically old.
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