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Theory of Life on the Orgueil
Meteorite (1864). Only five
weeks after Louis Pasteur (a Christian) give a particularly spirited and widely
reported defense of divine creation as the only initiator of life, a meteorite
fragment purportedly containing evidence of life from outer space was reported
to have fallen at Orgueil in southern France.
The fragment was analysed and said to show evidence of once living
organisms.[i] In 1871, Sir William
Thomson, president of the British Association, told the assembly that life had
come to this planet from outer space, carried on ‘countless seed-bearing
meteoritic stones.”[ii] In 1961, the Orgueil meteorite, held
in the American museum of Natural History, was subjected to mass
spectroscopy. The life form was found
to be a hoax – nothing more than a hexagonal crystal of iron sulfate.[iii]
[i] Brian Mason, “Organic matter from space,” Scientific American 208, March 1963, p.45. Cited in Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men: Darwin and the New World Order (Toronto, TFE Publishing, 1991), p.183. [ii] Alvan Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader (Stockholm: Göteberg Press, 1958), p.88. Cited in Taylor, In the Minds of Men, p.183. [iii] Further details may be found in Brian Mason’s book Meteorites, (New York: John Wiley, 1962), p.95. Cited in Taylor, In the Minds of Men, p.183. |