A Brief History of Creation

by Bill Mesler

  This was to be one of van Leeuwenhoek’s greatest discoveries. Already the first to see simple one-celled organisms, he had just discovered the existence of bacteria, among the oldest forms of life on the planet and the source of so many diseases and infections. Of course, nobody then understood the true significance of what he had seen, or that it would, two hundred years later, contribute to a revolution in medicine.

  At the time, his contemporaries were much more concerned with the question of where van Leeuwenhoek’s animalcules came from. Spontaneous generation was seized upon as a possible method for microbes to propagate themselves, but van Leeuwenhoek suspected differently. Francesco Redi’s Experiments on the Generation of Insects had been published in 1668, and the book had a strong impact on van Leeuwenhoek. He became convinced that Redi was correct, and that all life came from an egg. Some of his earliest letters contained thinly veiled attacks against spontaneous generation. “It was just as impossible,” wrote van Leeuwenhoek in a 1686 letter, “for a louse or a flea to come into being without procreation as it is for a horse or an ox, or some such animal to be born from the decay and corruption of a dung heap.”

  Many of van Leeuwenhoek’s investigations revolved around the subjects covered in Redi’s book. What Redi had deduced through experiment, van Leeuwenhoek actually showed through the lenses of his microscopes. There, clear as day, anyone could see the eggs of flies or lice or fleas, or any of those creatures once thought eggless and parentless.

  But in seemingly proving Redi correct, van Leeuwenhoek had settled one question, only to pose another that would prove far harder to answer. Tiny insects did indeed have eggs, but what of these far tinier animalcules? Not even he could claim to have seen their eggs.

  To most people, the very idea of van Leeuwenhoek’s animalcules fornicating seemed ludicrous. Spontaneous generation seemed a much more likely explanation, but van Leeuwenhoek was skeptical. He steadfastly asserted that these tiny beings reproduced the same way most creatures did. He even convinced himself that he could see them in the act of copulation.

  As a natural philosopher, van Leeuwenhoek was cast from the mold of Aristotle. He was an observer, not an experimentalist like Redi. But as his successes stacked up, he became more comfortable with his own knowledge and confident in advancing his own theories. He decided to settle the question of the animalcules’ reproduction by doing something he almost never did. He devised an experiment.

  The experiment van Leeuwenhoek came up with was simple. He took a pair of glass tubes and filled them with rainwater and ground pepper, a mixture he always found teeming with microscopic life. He heated both, which he knew from experience would kill the animalcules. Then he used the flame to completely seal one of the glass tubes. Without air, he imagined, nothing would be able to survive in the sealed tube. Two days later, he examined the tubes. As expected, the microorganisms had reappeared in the open tube. But when he unsealed the second tube, he was surprised to find them present there as well. The simplest explanation was that the creatures in the sealed glass tube had spontaneously generated.

  Van Leeuwenhoek never did bring himself to accept the easy explanation that the microbes he observed in the sealed tube had been spontaneously generated. Though he dutifully reported his results to the Royal Society, he was unsure what to make of them. For the most part, he simply moved on.

  IN 1698, Peter the Great, tsar of Russia and one of the most powerful monarchs in the world, embarked on a tour of the Netherlands to inspect the military capabilities of his allies. A riverboat carried him through the canals from the Hague and into Delft, where he dispatched two of his adjuncts to van Leeuwenhoek’s home to invite him to visit. Peter would have gone himself to van Leeuwenhoek, the men explained, but the tsar didn’t like crowds. When they met on the tsar’s boat, van Leeuwenhoek was delighted to find that Peter spoke perfect Dutch. He brought the monarch a gift, a microscope upon which had been fastened the tail of an eel so that he could see for himself the process of blood circulating. The tsar was delighted. Van Leeuwenhoek told acquaintances that he had found the encounter rather boring.

  Van Leeuwenhoek had by then become one of the most famous men in the world. He had discovered hosts of microbial creatures. He was the first person to see spermatozoa in semen, and he was one of the first to see blood flow through capillaries, which he described in great detail. He had even described things as small as a single cell. In a 1692 essay on the state of microscopy, Hooke complained that the field had been “reduced almost to a single Votary, which is Mr. Leeuwenhoek; besides whom I hear of none that make any other Use of that Instrument except for Diversion and Pastime.”

  The accolades were never enough for the Dutchman. Even into his later years, van Leeuwenhoek complained to anyone who would listen about the ill treatment that had greeted his earliest and greatest discoveries. He kept working into old age and continued his correspondence with the Royal Society and others. But even those letters often betrayed a kind of bitterness that had long since passed being appropriate. He would frequently provide lists of “witnesses” to confirm even the most mundane observations, even though his reputation was, by then, long beyond reproach.

  By 1723, van Leeuwenhoek was suffering from increasingly violent lung spasms that made it hard for him to breathe. He began writing about his condition in a series of letters to the Royal Society. Though blind by then in one eye, he accompanied these letters with microscopic investigations of the midsections of sheep and oxen. Physicians attributed his episodes to a bad heart, but van Leeuwenhoek thought their diagnosis wrong. It turned out the doctors were, indeed, mistaken. Van Leeuwenhoek had a rare condition called respiratory myoclonus, which would later come to be commonly known as Leeuwenhoek’s disease.

  He had a friend translate his last two letters to the Royal Society into Latin, one of the languages he had never mastered. The letters had a certain macabre character. Approaching ninety years of age, van Leeuwenhoek knew he was dying, yet he approached his end very clinically. One of his letters described a fit that lasted three days, “during which time my stomach and guts ceased to perform their office and motion, so that I was persuaded I stood at death’s door.”

  Van Leeuwenhoek’s condition gradually worsened. By August 1723, he was dead. He was buried in a cemetery in Delft, just yards from the grave of Hugo Grotius, the religious theorist whose ideas had formed the theological underpinning of the Methodist and Pentecostal movements, and one of the most important figures in the history of the Netherlands.

  Van Leeuwenhoek left his most prized possession to the Royal Society: a beautiful black-lacquer box that housed twenty-six silver microscopes, upon which he had permanently affixed specimens, all arranged like the “cabinets of curiosities” that were so popular during the era. On receipt, a clerk at the Royal Society dutifully recorded the contents in almost poetic fashion: “The eye of a Gnat . . . Globules of Blood, from which its Redness proceeds . . . The Vessels in a leaf of Tea . . . The Organ of Sight of a Flie.” The bequest was accompanied by a letter from a friend of van Leeuwenhoek asking that, upon receipt of the cabinet, the society send word to van Leeuwenhoek’s daughter, Maria, “a spinster of excellent repute, who has preferred a single life to matrimony, in order that she might ever continue to serve her father.” In 1739, Maria van Leeuwenhoek had a small monument erected to her father in the cemetery where he lay. Six years later, she was buried by his side. She had never married.

  Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is remembered as the “father of” a host of scientific disciplines and subdisciplines—most important among them, microbiology.* That he began as merely a simple tradesman makes his accomplishments all the more extraordinary. After his work was done, the world became a much grander place, filled with an infinite array of microscopic life that no human being before him had ever guessed existed.

  The implications for humankind’s understanding of the origin of life were enormous. Van Leeuwenhoek was a deeply religious Calvinist. Life, for him, was the wor
k of God’s hand alone. Such beliefs were held by almost everyone at the time, and they did little to prejudice him against spontaneous generation. His advocacy of the observations of Francesco Redi is what led van Leeuwenhoek to try to shut the door on the theory of spontaneous generation. Yet van Leeuwenhoek’s experiments opened up an entirely new and even more contentious debate that would consume some of Europe’s greatest scientific minds until the late nineteenth century: the debate over the possibility that microbial life could arise spontaneously. For the next two hundred years, some of the greatest scientific minds in the world would grapple with the question of just what had taken place in the spontaneous-generation experiments of van Leeuwenhoek and others. Soon the question was going to take on important religious implications, finding itself at the center of a debate between those who believed in a creator God and those who saw life as something that nature was capable of creating on its own.

  * Nearly 400 years after his death, a poll taken by a news organization in the Netherlands named van Leeuwenhoek the fourth greatest figure in Dutch history, ahead of Rembrandt and van Gogh.

  THE LABORATORY OF THE ATHEISTS

  It’s better to go along with the stories about gods than give in to what the natural philosophers call Fate. If there are gods there is some hope of appeasing them with a little worship; if not, we are ruled by something that no one can appease.

  —EPICURUS, c. 300 BC

  ON JULY 1, 1766, in the small French town of Abbeville, a young man named Jean-François de la Barre, was taken from a prison cell and brought to a room where his legs were placed in a torture device known as a “Spanish boot.” For the next hour, his jailors methodically crushed de la Barre’s legs and feet before, according to some accounts, removing his tongue. When they were finished, they lifted him up and placed his body in the cart that would carry him to his place of execution. Around his neck, they hung a sign on which they had written “impious, sacrilegious and hateful blasphemer.”

  As a member of the nobility—a descendant, in fact, of Joseph-Antoine de la Barre, a former governor of New France, France’s colonies in North America—Jean-François de la Barre was beheaded rather than hung. When they were finished, his executioners burned his body in a fire along with a copy of a banned book they had found in his room, the Dictionnaire philosophique, which had challenged the existence of miracles and mocked the literal truth of biblical stories. The ashes of both were then tossed into the nearby River Somme.

  At the time of the execution, the author of the Dictionnaire was keeping a low profile at his estate near Geneva. He was a man of many paradoxes. He was, on the one hand, vain, narcissistic, and, where his own personal safety was concerned, cowardly. He had already been thrown into the Bastille once and had endured two exiles, once for merely writing a poem that suggested Adam and Eve had never taken a bath. He had no wish to repeat either experience. Yet he was, at the same time, a brazen and impassioned champion of reform, a self-styled enemy of injustice and ignorance. He had tried in vain to use his influence to stop de la Barre’s execution. And that influence was considerable, for he was a writer whose skill, in his time, was matched by few. His sharp intellect had made him one of the most famous men in the world. He was certainly the most famous writer. His name was François-Marie Arouet. Most knew him only by his pen name, Voltaire.

  Voltaire’s Dictionnaire was really more of what would later be called an encyclopedia, a collection of essays on various wide-ranging subjects. The form had become extremely popular by that time. The book that established the genre was the Dictionnaire historique et critique, which had been written in Holland in 1697 by the man Voltaire had called “the greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote,” the French intellectual Pierre Bayle. Bayle’s Dictionnaire, like Voltaire’s, was extremely controversial. Bayle was a Huguenot, as the French Calvinists were known. He had fled the religious strife of France in the seventeenth century for the freedom of the Netherlands, where he was able to pursue his radical notions of religious tolerance and skepticism. Though Bayle always professed to have retained his Calvinist faith, his book implied that no reasonable person could believe the stories contained in the Bible. His critics called him godless. Some of his admirers said it too. Back in France, his writings led to the arrest of his father (a Calvinist minister) and of his brother. His brother would die in prison.

  Bayle’s Dictionnaire became the most widely read book of philosophy of the eighteenth century. Voltaire himself wrote a preface to a later edition. The book was also immensely influential in intellectual circles, helping to shape some of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson insisted that it be included among the first hundred books that would form the American Library of Congress. Publishers were soon flooded by similar books, each seemingly more radical than those that came before. Many of these works challenged religious conventions. Some had even begun to brazenly question the very existence of God, even though to do so was risky. It could even be deadly. In 1757, amid the reactionary climate that followed a crazed assassin’s attempt on the life of King Louis XV, the French Parliament had passed a slew of repressive measures, including the death penalty for anyone who “composed and printed writings tending to attack religion.”

  Nobody understood the risks better than Voltaire. “It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong,” he once wrote. There was a time in his life when he seemed to thrill in testing such dangers. He would even court them. But by the time of de la Barre’s execution, Voltaire was seventy-one. He was still physically able and mentally sharp, which he liked to say was because he fasted periodically, drank thirty cups of coffee a day, and ignored the advice of doctors. Age, however, had made him cautious.

  Voltaire had published his Dictionnaire anonymously in Geneva in 1764, using a publisher that specialized in dealing with forbidden books. There were many such publishers in that city, each with their own smuggling rings that specialized in slipping their wares into foreign countries. These same publishers also dealt in saucy books that passed for erotica at the time. The two genres sold extremely well, and their printers put both in the category of “philosophic books.”

  No one was fooled about the authorship of the Dictionnaire philosophique. Voltaire was renowned for not being able to keep a secret, especially when it involved a project in which he had invested so much of himself. The book had taken him twelve years to write. He considered it his life’s work, a compendium of all the wisdom he had gained and a summation of his philosophy. Yet when it was eventually banned and copies were burned in town squares all over France, Voltaire simply shrugged his shoulders and pretended not to care. Worse things could happen to a writer.

  Voltaire had taken care to couch many of the book’s more controversial lines, especially those regarding Christianity, using a style of writing called “reportage,” as if he were simply reporting the opinions of others. In truth, his private views on religion were often even harsher. In a letter to his lifelong confidant, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Voltaire had once called Christianity “the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.” It was not that Voltaire did not believe in God; he simply did not believe in an active God. “Is it not the most absurd of all extravagances,” he wrote in the Dictionnaire, “to imagine that the Infinite Supreme should, in favor of three or four hundred ants on this little heap of earth, derange the operation of the vast machinery that moves the universe?”

  AFTER THE PUBLIC FURY surrounding the de la Barre affair had faded away, Voltaire began composing a series of pamphlets based on his essay on miracles. These came to the attention of a traveling schoolmaster who happened to be visiting Geneva that year, who took it upon himself to publish a response. In an earnest style that contrasted strongly with Voltaire’s rhetorical flourish and bombastic sarcasm, the schoolmaster wrote that the world was indeed governed by laws that God had set down, but from time to time, God needed to intervene. “
Miracles,” he said, “are very intelligible and believable for the loyal Christian.”

  Nothing could drive Voltaire into a rage more easily than a critic, and he never let any criticism go unanswered. To Voltaire, it was as if the man had thrown down a gauntlet. “To hold a pen is to be at war,” he would often say. Now he really did see himself at war. It was as if he had channeled the whole de la Barre affair into this one argument. His penmanship grew more precise, as it always did when he was angry. His letters grew more legible. A heated exchange of epistolary pamphlets began.

  Such debates were common in the eighteenth century. It was customary for such exchanges to remain anonymous, but by the fourth exchange of letters, Voltaire had learned his antagonist’s identity. He was an Englishman named John Turberville Needham, a Catholic priest. Needham seemed the embodiment of everything Voltaire detested: the church, sanctimony, superstition. Voltaire thought him an utter simpleton.

  Needham could often be naïve. He tended to trust in the good nature of others, sometimes to a fault. But he was by no means simple. Needham was an accomplished natural philosopher, microscopist, and one of the finest experimentalists of his time. His scientific explorations into the generation of life had made him famous. His work featured prominently in all of the most important scientific journals of the time, and he had become the first Catholic priest ever admitted to the ranks of Britain’s Royal Society. Above all else, he was known as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the theory of spontaneous generation.