Monday 4 August 2008

Is this quote real?

There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility. Spontaneous generation, that life arose from non-living matter was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasture and others. That leaves us with the only possible conclusion that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God...I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to evolution. - Dr. George Wald, 1967 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, professor emeritus at Harvard in biology

I heard the above quote from Driscoll in his sermon on creation. I thought it was a pretty good quote. Anthony Flew and Aristotle wouldn't have been proud of this line of thinking, as they always wanted you to follow the science where ever it would lead. The main problem I have with this quote is that I don't know if it is a real quote.

Driscoll said this guy won the Nobel Prize in the field of biology in 1971 (around the 38:31 mark), but on their site for that year there is no Dr. George Wald. There is a Dr. George Wald who shared the noble prize with two others for medicine in 1967.

Even conservapedia (its a wiki so it must be true) has three different variations of the quote... maybe Wald said the same thing three times... I tried looking up the articles in Scientific American, and in the ANU library but I couldn't find any copies of them (it might just turn out that in 1954 they didn't really store much on the internet).

Does anyone know if the quote is real or how I can get my hands on old copies of Scientific American (without paying for it- I mean I wanna know if this quote is real, but not enough to put money down)?

2 comments:

  1. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-4.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Anonymous,

    Your Google-Fu is stronger than mine.

    I did have my doubts that the quote would have been published in an academic journal.

    ReplyDelete