# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1856_S70
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

70             Dr. Seyffarth's Corrections, etc.

generatio aequivoca. As is easily seen, the generatio aequivoca, which was devised in order to remove every mystery from the history of creation, sets in place of the one problem it was meant to eliminate (creation out of nothing) a multitude of others. First we are supposed to accept in good faith that matter is eternal, uncreated; then we are supposed to grant that all creatures could have arisen through generatio aequivoca; further, that they really did arise through generatio aequivoca at the first origin (creation), where the suitable conditions were present; we are supposed to be talked into a specific difference regarding the origin and propagation of the higher and lower kinds, and finally, on the basis of this imagined difference, to believe that even now little animals and plants arise without germ or seed, merely because natural scientists cannot explain how these germs reach a particular place. Only the greatest inconsistency, joined with blind fanaticism, could imagine that such so-called findings of science had overthrown the truthfulness of the creation account, for no sensible person, whether believing or unbelieving, will grant that the eternity of matter is more comprehensible than creation out of nothing, will grant that the more familiar thing — the begetting and propagation of human beings and of the higher kinds of animals and plants — can be made clear to him by the less familiar thing, the propagation of infusoria and cryptogams. Only when one reverses the matter can one hope to come closer to the truth. As far as the human eye reaches into created life, and can trace the organs of generation and propagation, propagation is accomplished by seed and germ. Accordingly it will be the same with the lower kinds as well. Notable recent natural scientists have in fact shown with great probability that the matter stands according to the conclusion we have just drawn.

From these examples, to which all the other proofs brought forward for and against Holy Scripture are analogous, it is clear that anyone who, seeking a firm foundation, turns to natural history will at most receive probabilities from it, but nowhere certainties. The reason for this lies in the fact that natural science and the disciplines related to it have objects at whose beginning no one could have been present as an eyewitness, because God the LORD made all things before man existed. Man therefore knows only as much about the beginning of things as God the LORD has seen fit to reveal to him, and these revelations are altogether laid down in Holy Scripture. But the inference from the present state of things to their beginning must always remain doubtful, because the human understanding has nowhere succeeded, even in the very least, and probably never will succeed, in penetrating into the essence of things themselves. Even the phenomena we can grasp only most imperfectly, and therefore from them we cannot arrive at the ground [of things]. Karl von Raumer (in his The Exodus of the Israelites from