Did God create life according to the principle of doubling?

Doubling does indeed stand at the beginning of life: every cell divides and so multiplies. The same principle also shows how goodness and faith spread when each person passes on what they have received.

Anyone who looks at the earliest forms of life sees how hard things were for life at the beginning. Conditions were so hostile that life could survive only because every cell was able to double. Each cell divided, and each new cell divided again. In this way some bacteria grew in a short time into colonies whose numbers can hardly be expressed. Our own bodies, too, still maintain themselves through cell division.

Nature does not work like a beehive, where only the queen reproduces and all the others work for her. In early nature every single cell carries within it the ability to bring forth something new.

An old story about the invention of chess shows how immense this power is. A ruler was so delighted with the game that he promised the inventor any reward he wished. The inventor asked only for rice: one grain on the first square, two on the second, and on each further square twice as many as on the one before. It sounded modest. Yet in the end not even the whole empire would have held that much rice.

The same law applies to goodness. A message does not spread because a few specialists look after it while everyone else watches. It grows when everyone who has received it passes it on to at least one more person. That is how it was in the early days of the prophets. The parable of the grain in the second verse shows how God multiplies a small beginning.