kissell@flairvax.UUCP (Kevin Kissell) (11/18/83)
Contrary to what George La Belle seems to want to *believe* "spontaneous generation" was never a religious dogma so much as a SCIENTIFIC THEORY widely held by natural scientists of the day because it was the SIMPLEST EXPLANATION for the OBSERVED FACTS. It didn't take a microscope to disprove it, either, just an inquisitive Italian with an experimental method. It was a theory every bit as valid as those of phlogiston and the luminiferous ether. Science is allowed to be wrong. Only those who make a religion out of it (and there sure seem to be a lot of you out there) insist that a failed theory must have been unscientific because "science embodies truth", an assertion philosophically on a par with papal infallibility.